Review: Sleepless Night (2011)

Cast: Tomer Sisley, Serge Riaboukine, Julien Boisselier
Director: Frédéric Jardin
Country: France | Belgium | Luxembourg
Genre: Action | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: Sleepless Night opens in North American theatres today.

For years now French thrillers have been besting Hollywood’s, offering the kind of character drama and tense ferocity studios have consistently failed to produce. Films like District 13, Anything for Her, Crimson Rivers, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped may come as far from perfect, but they all carry an uncompromising intensity the majority of their big-budgeted American cousins have proved that money just can’t buy. Frédéric Jardin’s Sleepless Night not only joins this club, it eclipses each of the aforementioned, finding in the mostly single-setting real-time nature of its premise an almost claustrophobic sense of tension.

Jardin’s move to set the entirety of the film’s action—opening scene notwithstanding—within the confines of this one building paves the way for a relentless marathon of chases and brawls, with a dozen key combatants from at least four different factions fighting a seemingly endless battle on all fronts.

Beginning at dawn as two men hijack a car transporting drugs through the streets of an unnamed city, Sleepless Night hits the ground running and, save for a brief stretch immediately afterward where it introduces its lead, never lets up. Tomer Sisley is Vincent, one of the two hijackers: a corrupt (or is he?) cop aiding a local drug lord in taking out the competition. Sisley’s everyman demeanour makes Vincent our perfect guide into this underground world of police corruption and ruthless criminality as his son is kidnapped and taken hostage in the back rooms of a bustling nightclub. Jardin’s move to set the entirety of the film’s action—opening scene notwithstanding—within the confines of this one building paves the way for a relentless marathon of chases and brawls, with a dozen key combatants from at least four different factions fighting a seemingly endless battle on all fronts.

For a fight scene to be truly effective, it requires one of two things: ingenuity or emotion. Show an audience a brawl built of things they’ve seen before and it’s likely to inspire in them only boredom. With the addition of either some innovative action (as The Raid proves so brilliantly) or a compelling character whom it affects us to see hurt, a fight scene can rise above the limitations of familiarity and attain that excitement and danger on which the action genre thrives. Sleepless Night places its chips more upon the latter engagement, but displays no lack of daring with the former. Its greatest scene is a ferocious fracas in a restaurant kitchen—a deliberate acknowledgement of a tired trope—which never lets a fresh and brutal usage of every available utensil get in the way of showing that our hero is here genuinely suffering. Might he die? It never seems unlikely, and the fact that Jardin gets us to worry that he will is the greatest of the film’s many successes.

The double-crossings, double-agents, and doubling-backs are often so many that it can be tough to keep track of which are the good and bad guys, but in a way that’s sort of the point: this ferocious monolocular melee blurs the lines between singular virtue and vice, mirroring the murky motivations of our lead as he strives to rescue his son.

With so few pauses in the vivid torpor of bloodshed and bruising, it’s impressive that Jardin and co-writer Nicolas Saada can find time to concoct any narrative at all, much less one so layered and labyrinthine. The double-crossings, double-agents, and doubling-backs are often so many that it can be tough to keep track of which are the good and bad guys, but in a way that’s sort of the point: this ferocious monolocular melee blurs the lines between singular virtue and vice, mirroring the murky motivations of our lead as he strives to rescue his son. It’s arguable that we never really learn his true allegiances, and therein lies the attraction of this character: it doesn’t matter whether this man is good or bad, whether he falls on the side of the law or the outlaws. What matters is that his son is in danger, and he will do anything he can to save him from it. As his breathing gets more laboured, his fighting gets more desperate, and his readiness to harm gets more and more casual—a scene where he takes on a well-meaning female officer makes for a particularly tough watch but an ingenious character-building addition—our understanding of him gets all the richer, and our hope for his victory all the deeper. What more does an action movie need to succeed?

Another winning Euro-thriller to put studio efforts to shame, Sleepless Night has already been booked for a US remake, as is inevitable. No amount of careful reconstruction can hope to replicate the dazzling ingenuity of this intensely unwavering onslaught of pain, though, and Jardin’s work raises the bar on an already high standard of French film. Thriving on the simplicity of its setup and understandable desperation of a father out to save his son, its concentrated cocktail of believable stakes and incessantly brutal face-smashing takes on a dramatic relevance that ensures it’s never just another bland action adventure.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Having spent the vast majority of my life sharing in the all too prevalent belief than cinema is merely dumbed-down weekend escapism for the masses, I was lucky enough to turn on a television at the exact right moment to have my perspectives on the medium completely transformed. Those first two and a half hours marked the beginning of a new life revolving around—maybe even depending upon—the screen and the depth of artistry, intellectual stimulation, and emotional exhilaration it can provide.

Latest posts by Ronan Doyle (see all)

• This Week on Demand: 18/08/2013 - August 20, 2013
• Locarno Film Festival: If I Were a Thief… I’d Steal, Roxanne, The Special Need, The Green Years, 2001: A Space Odyssey, It Should Happen to You, and Mouton - August 19, 2013
• Locarno Film Festival Review: Short Term 12 (2013) - August 15, 2013