Last year, I called Jennifer Kent's fantastic horror debut The Babadook the scariest film I'd ever seen, and it was. Kent masterfully spun a remarkably suspenseful film, with an imaginative monster and solid, well-earned scares, and it payed off on a number of levels. Now, half a year later, we have The Nightmare, Rodney Ascher's Room 237 follow-up, a bona fide horror documentary on sleep paralysis that scares just as effectively, and due to its real-life implications, it carries a sort of horror that transcends cinema.
Consisting of eight spliced interviews with sufferers of sleep paralysis, as they ruminate on their experiences with the condition. Much like Room 237, Ascher's fantastic debut from two years ago, the combination of these interviews promulgates a fascinating composite account of the issues, a sort of cubistic discourse that gives a full view of the subject. Essentially, by focusing on first-hand accounts, Ascher has crafted one of the most haunting portraits of fear ever seen on screen, delving into the human mind with a surprising deal of power and virtuosity.
This is the very genius of The Nightmare: while critics have complained that the film ignores medicine and science in its treatment of sleep paralysis, the brilliance of the film is Ascher's decision not to focus on why the experience happens, but rather, what rather it means to its victims in regard to fear and psychosis. This is not a film driven by specificity, but rather by the vagueness that lurks in the darkness; instead of a diagnosis or an explanation, the portrait of fear achieved in The Nightmare hits harder and cuts deeper than a medical lecture.
While the structure and methodology of the film serve as its backbone, though, the most interesting part of The Nightmare is Rodney Ascher's direction. While Room 237 consisted of a smooth assembly of filmed interviews cut with archival footage, the direction of The Nightmare shows his progression as a filmmaker: here, one-on-one interviews and reenactments of dreams combine to give form to the highly abstract subject matter, with a remarkable amount of aesthetic and tonal mindfulness. While the direct interviews are shot in the dark with attention paid to interesting lighting and framing as to avoid the banality of talking heads, its the highly abstract dream sequences that really impress, each one taking on a markedly Lynchian quality of the perverse subconscious, looking fantastic, and earning long, relentless, well-earned scares that build toward the filmmaking with beauty and effect. This, combined with Saul Herckis' moody yet indubitably tight editing that never lets the viewer feel completely at ease and certainly never bores, makes for a pretty remarkable cinematic experience, one well suited to the subject matter and modi operandi of the film.
Ultimately, more than anything, The Nightmare is a wildly entertaining, harrowingly terrifying piece of cinema, as well as a remarkably effective tone poem on fear, the subconscious, and how they manifest one another in the human mind. If anything is clear from this film, though, it's that Rodney Ascher is quickly becoming one of the most innovative, smartest, most creative documentarians in cinema today.
This is the very genius of The Nightmare: while critics have complained that the film ignores medicine and science in its treatment of sleep paralysis, the brilliance of the film is Ascher's decision not to focus on why the experience happens, but rather, what rather it means to its victims in regard to fear and psychosis. This is not a film driven by specificity, but rather by the vagueness that lurks in the darkness; instead of a diagnosis or an explanation, the portrait of fear achieved in The Nightmare hits harder and cuts deeper than a medical lecture.
While the structure and methodology of the film serve as its backbone, though, the most interesting part of The Nightmare is Rodney Ascher's direction. While Room 237 consisted of a smooth assembly of filmed interviews cut with archival footage, the direction of The Nightmare shows his progression as a filmmaker: here, one-on-one interviews and reenactments of dreams combine to give form to the highly abstract subject matter, with a remarkable amount of aesthetic and tonal mindfulness. While the direct interviews are shot in the dark with attention paid to interesting lighting and framing as to avoid the banality of talking heads, its the highly abstract dream sequences that really impress, each one taking on a markedly Lynchian quality of the perverse subconscious, looking fantastic, and earning long, relentless, well-earned scares that build toward the filmmaking with beauty and effect. This, combined with Saul Herckis' moody yet indubitably tight editing that never lets the viewer feel completely at ease and certainly never bores, makes for a pretty remarkable cinematic experience, one well suited to the subject matter and modi operandi of the film.
Ultimately, more than anything, The Nightmare is a wildly entertaining, harrowingly terrifying piece of cinema, as well as a remarkably effective tone poem on fear, the subconscious, and how they manifest one another in the human mind. If anything is clear from this film, though, it's that Rodney Ascher is quickly becoming one of the most innovative, smartest, most creative documentarians in cinema today.
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