Hayden Panettiere Stars in ‘Sleepwalker’ Trailer as Her Reality Unravels
When you think about it, it’s surprising that sleepwalkers don’t appear in more horror movies. The notion of moving involuntarily while unconscious is intrinsically creepy and frightening (all the more so for being firmly grounded in reality), but the horror genre has made us more scared of what Freddy Krueger might do to us when we’re asnooze in bed than what we might do to ourselves (or others) while wandering around without awareness. Even “Sleepwalker,” a forthcoming psychological thriller that is self-evidently concerned with somnambulism, seems to be taking a hackneyed, PTSD-based approach to a phenomenon that is more terrifying for its complete arbitrariness.
Hayden Panettiere as a Bereaved Mother and Wife
“Sleepwalker,” the trailer for which dropped on December 3, stars Hayden Panettiere, who has almost literally been acting all her life, appearing in her first commercial when she was 11 months old. As an older child, she voice-acted in such children’s films as “A Bug’s Life” (for which she received a Grammy nomination) and “Dinosaur,” and in adulthood, she’s best known as Juliette Barnes in the musical drama series “Nashville.” On a horror note, she played Kirby Reed, the quick-witted horror enthusiast in “Scream 4,” who became an FBI agent in “Scream VI.” (She is slated to reprise her role in “Scream 7.”)
In “Sleepwalker,” Panettiere plays Sarah, an artist who is tormented by the memory of a tragic accident: her abusive husband was driving while drowsy and practically fell asleep at the wheel, causing the car to go off the road and crash, killing their young daughter and leaving him comatose. She still lives with her young son, who certainly has plenty of his own psychological bruising as a result of the tragedy. Suddenly, she becomes prone to somnambulism, which hasn’t previously troubled her since she was a child. A therapist diagnoses her sleepwalking as “a manifestation of misplaced guilt.” She feels her grasp on reality weakening.
And she’s no mere sleepwalker: her bouts of somnambulism are accompanied by chilling visions of dark, lurking entities who resemble ghoulish versions of her husband and late daughter. When she begins painting these nightmarish sights, her son remarks: “That looks like the ghost from my dream – like Dad. His ghost talks to me through the door.” The spirits of Sarah’s husband and daughter seem increasingly menacing, as the late clips of the trailer show an attempted seance, intimations of temporal dislocation, a moment in which the father’s spirit lunges at Sarah, and, most terrifyingly, a scene of her son sleepwalking in front of a car on the road.
Does “Sleepwalker” Miss the Point of Sleepwalking?
This last visual provides the trailer’s biggest heart-in-mouth moment, one that unfortunately calls attention to the overall miscalculation of “Sleepwalker”‘s premise. Sleepwalking is terrifying for two reasons: it happens completely at random, and it is a phenomenon that causes one’s body to move at length without one’s conscious control. On any given night, for reasons not well understood, one might step into traffic, jump off a four-story building, or do something equally harmful to another person.
Sleepwalking is a danger that invokes the same profound horror as something like this year’s excellent “Weapons,” in which an evil witch casts spells that enable her to take control of other people’s bodies. Crucially, it is a phenomenon in which one’s own mind has no agency and no consciousness. However, that’s not the case in “Sleepwalker,” in which (the aforementioned clip notwithstanding) the primary peril of sleepwalking seems to be the fact that it causes Sarah to wander her dark house and encounter sinister entities. It’s a psychological trauma-based film that seems more in line with such previous horror films as “Smile” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” in which reality bends in nightmarish ways.
Conclusion
It’s both less common and arguably more chilling to see a horror movie in which there are no nightmares and no distortions of reality – just the omnipresent possibility that a given character may wake up far away from where she went to sleep, if she wakes up at all. As a thriller, “Sleepwalker” appears competently made and cast. But it’s disappointing that it doesn’t have the originality to live up to its own title.
“Sleepwalker” will be released on January 6.
