Sleepless [Blu-ray]

Director: Dario Argento

Overview

Director Dario Argento, best known for his stylishly bloody horror films, revisits the style and themes of his early directorial efforts in this tense crime thriller. A prostitute (Barbara Lerici) discovers one of her customers has a taste for much rougher sex than she's willing to give him; trying to sneak away from her john, she accidentally walks off with one of his scrapbooks, from which she discovers her client apparently committed a series of unsolved murders almost 20 years earlier. The john tracks down the prostitute and murders her to insure her silence; this awakens in him the desire to kill again, and soon he's once again leaving a bloody swath across Italy. Ulisse Moretti (Max Von Sydow), the police detective who investigated the earlier wave of killings, is brought out of retirement when clues link the new murders to those committed in the early '80s, and the aging cop finds his sometimes foggy memory jolted back to recognition by the growing number of bloody victims. Meanwhile, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), whose saw his mother being killed by the murderer as a boy, learns that the killer is back at work, and sets out to investigate the case on his own. Non Ho Sonno features an original musical score by the rock band Goblin, who also wrote music for a number of Argento's best-known films.

Product Details

Release Date:	04/06/2021
UPC:	0738329252939
Original Release:	2001
Source:	Scorpion Releasing
Language:	English
Time:	1:57:00
Sales rank:	18,584

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Max von Sydow	Ulisse Moretti
Stefano Dionisi	Giacomo
Chiara Caselli	Gloria
Paolo Maria Scalondro	Capo Ispettore Manni
Roberto Zibetti	Lorenzo
Actor	Actor
Rossella Falk	Laura De Fabritius
Gabriele Lavia	Lorenzo's Father
Massimo Sarchielli	Actor
Barbara Lerici	Actor
Roberto Accornero	Actor
Goblin	Composer

Technical Credits

Dario Argento

Franco Ferrini

Dario Argento	Director,Producer,Producer,Screenwriter
Franco Ferrini	Screenwriter
Tullio Morganti	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

Italian horror master Dario Argento returns to form with Sleepless, a detective thriller reminiscent of his Hitchcockian debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The venerable Max von Sydow stars as Moretti, a retired police detective and insomniac committed to fulfilling a two-decade-old pledge to avenge the murder of a young boy's mother. With surreal giallo flair, Argento introduces the killer early on -- a dwarf who uses a morbid nursery rhyme as the blueprint for his serial homicides. The twist? This small killer is thought to be long dead, until a spate of new murders employing his "style" suggests otherwise. Moretti teams up with the boy he made his promise to, Giacomo (Sefano Dionisi), now a grown man. As Moretti, von Sydow eerily resembles Father Merrick, the elderly priest he portrayed in The Exorcist. Recalling in many ways his astounding Opera, Argento again creates brutally imaginative murder set pieces. Echoing throughout the film is the killer's sinister nursery rhyme (written by the director's daughter Asia Argento), which taps into the film's greatest vision of terror: That evil can be as irrational as a nonsensical children's verse.

Barnes & Noble - R.J. Wafer

We couldn't have hoped for a more spectacular return to form from a director who has, in the past, earned a reputation as one of the brightest--certainly one of the weirdest--talents in modern horror. Sleepless...is a fabulous, frightening adrenaline trip, two hours of unbridled, exhilarating mayhem. Chris Gallant

Fangoria