20 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen: Deep Sleep (2013)

I've reviewed a number of Neo-Giallo films last year and I'm constantly looking for more.  I just can't help myself, I love the genre.  The films are so full of provocations so unabashedly exploitative in nature.  Everything is fair game in a Giallo. Sex, death, car chases, you name it.  They can be serious, they can be silly, they can be somewhere in the middle.  They can border and blur the lines of horror and crime stories.  They're fetishistic and they have some of the most awesome soundtracks and scores known to cinema.  Since around 2012 they've been making a come back as fans of the genre are starting to make their own films, taking the low budget aesthetics and applying them in great homage.  Luciano Onetti's Deep Sleep takes homage one step further, fully justifying it's status as a Neo-Giallo.

After a killer with a traumatized childhood murders a Brazilian prostitute someone slips an envelope under their door with pictures of the murder and a phone number written down.  The killer calls the number and is informed by the voice on the other line that they are going to kill them.  In a refreshing twist, the killer becomes the hunted and must try to figure out who the mysterious voice on the telephone is before it's too late, but what takes place is full of twists and turns as nothing is quite as it appears.

Onetti (who wrote, shot, edited, and scored the film) certainly seems to have a knack for the disturbing and the deranged.  past and present converge between constant first person perspective to get the audience in the mind of his incredibly deranged killer.  Hallucinogenic hardly begins to describe the kaleidoscopic childhood memory sequence and the music and sound design only heighten this property.  There are a lot of interesting visual cues.  The two gloved killers are denoted by white latex gloves for one and black leather gloves for the other.  Plenty of nods to Dario Argento's Deep Red, Sergio Martino's Case of the Scorpions Tail (particularly the colorfully tripped out trailer) and other works of the genre are represented through roughshod film grain and color timing to match the seedy quality of fading prints.

The problem with the film is it's constant POV which dominates the 66 minute runtime.  While Onetti peppers it with other creepy close up shots of clocks, photographs, other actors (usually victims and hands) he relies far to heavily upon the POV creating an overly claustrophobic look.  While this is effective at times, on the whole, it cheapens the narrative.  Still it's an intriguing story with little dialogue and an incredible score that sounds like it could have been actually recorded in the 70s.  A great look at what can be done with no budget, but probably only of interest to serious fans of the genre.