I was Put to Sleep by ‘The Sleep Experiment’

I’ve had the film The Sleep Experiment on my watchlist for ages on Tubi, and I decided to finally hit play on it the other day. After I finished, I hit play on La Llorona, and turned it off immediately because it was entirely in Spanish and had no subtitles. But it felt empowering to do that, y’know? To hit stop on something I didn’t want to watch? I wish I’d done that with Experiment.

Oi mate, waddayasayin’?

The film is about five prisoners who are chemically rendered unable to sleep for thirty days and are housed in a small room with little to no entertainment, as an experiment. One of the prisoners is a plant, and is actually another researcher, and runs out of the room every few days with health problems as an excuse. The story is framed around a personally affected cop who’s investigating the researcher in charge of the experiment, but that part of the film was… amateur.

There’s maybe three locations the movie takes place in, and has something like eight, nine total actors? It’s low budget. But that low budget apparently extended to their scriptwriters, because it was very, very apparent that someone who speaks American English wrote a script intended for British and Scottish (Irish? Idk bro, I’m racist) actors. The film was full of words and sayings that are blatantly American, being said by a guy with bad teeth and a snobby accent. It was jarring.

Unfortunately, for a film billed as a horror, the movie was not scary. There’s a lot of potential with sleep deprivation, I think, in horror. Experiment reminded me of the Jared Harris and Olivia Cooke film The Quiet Ones, which uses sleep and sleep deprivation as an element for inciting horror, but to a more effective degree (but not so effective that I bothered writing about the movie. That shit sucked too). Experiment relied on… people jumping out of the dark during two or three hallucinations? Perhaps they were banking on the characters being creepy enough to induce tension.

That the movie wasn’t scary is extra frustrating considering if you Google (or Bing, if you’re a fool) the sleep experiment, you get the relatively famous Russian Sleep Experiment creepypasta. This movie could have been, and should have been, so much more terrifying.

Oi mate, waddayadoin’?

The acting was fine, with one exception, but the characters themselves were largely uninteresting. The film made a genuine effort through its writing and score to humanize them and establish their feelings and desires, but it felt flat because I couldn’t fucking understand their thick highland accents. On top of that, despite the film being almost entirely character work, I don’t feel like I spent enough time with any of them.

I think that may have been the point, or at least partly the point. The film makes it a point to remind us that psychopaths can be lying and we’d never know we’re talking to one. So when the characters lie over and over, we’re never sure if we can believe anything new they say, and as a result, you’re left wondering- which one is the psychopath? At least, I think that was the intent, what with the police interview framing device. This falls through super quick, unfortunately.

So remember how I was like, ‘British people talking like Americans’ and ‘acting was good with one exception’ and also ‘low budget writing’? Ok, well the lead researcher is revealed to be the psychopath the movie has wanted you to be looking for among the prisoners. The main baddie was just… the main baddie the whole time? The most psycho looking, sounding, and motivated character was… the psychopath? Ok. This movie was

BAD

I watched The Sleep Experiment on Tubi.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!