Review: State Like Sleep

Writer-director Meredith Danluck pulls a canny but superficial trick with State Like Sleep, refusing to commit her film to any singular genre as a signifier of her heroine’s own detachment. Danluck is devoted to Katherine’s (Katherine Waterston) aimlessness, following her as she sorts out the mess that’s left in the wake of the possible murder of her celebrity husband, Stefan (Michiel Huisman). The film’s dreamy, dreadful tempo is established with the opening images, as the camera hovers spectrally over cityscapes that are colored with a surreal cloudiness. Danluck then highlights totems of past debauchery, of empty beer and liquor bottles and drug paraphernalia, before lingering over a bullet hole in a window frame. Such images aren’t unexpected of a hybrid thriller noir, but Danluck and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt imbue them with an unease that’s complemented by the disorientation of the narrative’s chronological hopscotching.

There is, however, a difference between ambiguity and vagueness, which State Like Sleep doesn’t always discern. At a certain point in the film, it seems as if Danluck has constructed her screenplay out of isolated scenes that seem meaningful in the moment but don’t actually add up to anything. As Katherine is pulled from New York City into a quasi-murder mystery in Brussels, Danluck offers a gallery of “cool” encounters that give State Like Sleep fleeting indie-hipster cred, with only glints of authentic emotional resonance.

When Katherine discovers a club that Stefan once frequented, she enters a neon-drenched realm that suggests the work of a set designer who’s a David Lynch devotee. (Somehow, it feels inevitable when Luke Evans appears as the club’s sexy, dangerous proprietor.) The sequences in this club aren’t without a kick, but it’s unclear what it has to do with Katherine’s mother, Elaine (Mary Kay Place), who’s recovering from a stroke in a nearby hospital. And how does any of this material relate to Katherine’s potentially kinky relationship with a fellow American traveler, Edward (Michael Shannon)? For a while, Danluck’s command of atmosphere encourages one to go along for the ride and take every scene in State Like Sleep on its own faintly Sundance Lab-y terms. And one exchange, in which Katherine and Edward discuss words that sound like what they mean, is a funny and poignant expression of erotic alienation.

But the film meanders for so long that the seams begin to show. We never learn what Katherine and Stefan meant to one another, as their flashbacks are mostly composed of clichéd pillow shots of them canoodling in bed. Danluck also has little interest in Katherine’s relationship to Stefan’s fame, and how that inspires Katherine’s own art-making. (Katherine is a photographer, though that doesn’t matter to State Like Sleep’s various narratives any more than any other thread of information does.) Which is to say that Danluck sustains an atmosphere of mournfulness throughout the film as a way of evading the task of imagining the inner lives of her characters.

Katherine is a vulnerable rabbit who’s moved through a labyrinth of thriller clichés—a conceit that might have worked if Danluck had fully delivered a thriller rather than a patchwork of tropes and self-help platitudes. Danluck’s refusal to give her narrative a conventional catharsis once again suggests Lynch’s work, especially Twin Peaks: The Return. However, Lynch’s characters, underneath the stylization of the writing and acting, feel authentic and certainly one of a kind. (This near-paradox of reality imbedded within intense stylization is the miracle of Lynch’s best work.) Lynch is willing to give grief its due, while Danluck remains stuck in a structural and tonal middle lane: between convention and self-conscious oddness.