»SLEEP«

Marlene lives in Hamburg with her daughter Mona and suffers from chronic recurring nightmares. She believes she has discovered the true location of her nightmares in a newspaper ad: the Hotel Sonnenhügel in the village of Stainbach. She secretly travels to this idyllic spot where she finds her fears confirmed. When she discovers that her nightmares are linked to three suicides, she falls into a coma. Meanwhile her daughter Mona turns up in the sleepy village looking for clues but is soon troubled by nightmares of her own. This heralds a rollercoaster ride through the harrowing depths of Mona’s unknown family history. Dreams and reality become blurred – and Mona gives an ancient curse a new strength. Nightmares and trauma, fear and repression, guilt and atonement. In his debut film, director Michael Venus plays virtuosically with the emotional motifs and violence of the horror film genre, interweaving it with the haunting myths of German romantic fairy tales. He drives his magnificent ensemble of actors, built around newcomer Gro Swantje Kohlhof and arthouse star Sandra Hüller as the harrowing daughter-mother combination, through a tangle of dark secrets, where they are constantly in danger of waking up in a dismal past. A native German horror film.