Until the day he plucks his eyebrows, Luis Tosar will always be typecast as the villain: we’ve seen him baddying it up wonderfully as the noble, bullish convict Malamadre in CELDA 211 and as the ice-cold drugs kingpin in Michael Mann’s MIAMI VICE.
He tones it down a notch in MIENTRAS DUERMES, playing César, a downtrodden janitor who just wants to be happy – and to this end, makes increasingly nefarious interferences into the lives of the tenants in his building, like an evil AMELIE. Jaume Balagueró brings to his new thriller all the nastiness of [REC], but there is no zombie-itis to be found in this world: César is a hyper-real predator. Although he’s well-loved by the occupants of the apartment block, their affection is wasted on him – as soon as he gains a tenant’s trust he begins brainstorming ways to cause them misery.
We slowly learn that this is his life: he takes employment as a janitor and ruins as many lives as possible before he is sacked, whereupon he moves on to the next hive of happy fools. He has the keys to their apartments, and with bluff, disarming charm also obtains the key to each person’s downfall. Only one person has seen César’s true colours – a sullen, complex little girl called Úrsula (Iris Almeida Molina) who has seen him slip into a sleeping tenant’s apartment, and is blackmailing him. We spend an uncomfortable amount of time with César in Clara’s flat – but the relationship between him and Úrsula, if developed further, would make for a wonderful LEON-esque sequel.
César’s hacksaw is the new “Chekhov’s gun”…
There are touches of Norman Bates and Chip Douglas to this character, but it’s difficult to accept the charismatic Tosar as a depressive voyeur, and MIENTRAS DUERMES is never quite as horrific as PSYCHO or as blackly humorous as CABLE GUY. The tenants in César’s building are cartoonish but not quite funny – the extremity of César’s actions is shocking, but somehow shallow and unfocused. MIENTRAS DUERMES is a solid stalker thriller that leaves plenty of room for speculation. César’s hacksaw is the new “Chekhov’s gun”, for instance – you’re never quite sure how far he will go, or whether some of his transgressions are embellished after the fact, in his imagination. And is that even really his mother – that mute woman in the hospital bed, who quivers with horror when he visits to offer a thoughtful update on his latest project? This is a film which plants seeds just as César plants cockroach eggs in Clara’s apartment – it never quite goes for a belly shot, but on your way home you’ll find yourself joining the dots and fearing the beetlebrowed menace more than you ever did in the screening.
SLEEP TIGHT screens again at 11pm tonight
httpvh://youtu.be/ueSV27koPPg