Sleepless Beauty

Would you be able to never sleep if you were kidnapped? Because only then can you perhaps survive … UCM.ONE is releasing the new masterpiece by director Pavel Khvaleev on the film label “M-Square Pictures“. The film “Sleepless Beauty“, which has already been shown at many festivals such as Sitges, Imagine, Dead by Night, Obscura Berlin and Bastalavista, is as disturbing as it is fascinating. A visually stunning and shocking roller coaster ride for all horror fans!

Synopsis

Sleepless Beauty” tells the cruel story of a young teacher, Mila, who is kidnapped by a mysterious organization called Recreation and locked up in an almost empty room. Her unknown kidnappers communicate with her only through a loudspeaker and set strict rules: she is not allowed to sleep and has to perform bizarre and brutal tasks if she wants to stay alive. At first it looks like all this is intended to entertain some perverts, but as the assignments get tougher and tougher, Mila begins to realize that she is losing control of her own mind and may actually be the guinea pig in a perverse and life-threatening psychological experiment.

About Pavel Khvaleev

Pavel Khvaleev was born in Naberezhnie Chelni, Russia, in 1984. He started producing music when he was only 15 years old. In 2004 he founded the music project Moonbeam together with his brother Vitaly. During the following years Moonbeam became a famous international act in the world wide electronic dance scene, entering DJ Magazine‘s annual list of the world’s best DJs TOP 100 in the year 2000. All 40 official Moonbeam music video clips were directed by Pavel, many of them were shown at international film festivals such as Berlin Independent Film Festival, Shockfest Film Festival or Venice Film Festival. In 2012 Pavel Khvaleev debuted with his first full-length feature film as the director of the movie “The Random“. 2013 Pavel and his team of only 8 people started the creation of his second feature film called „III – The Ritual“ with a budget of only € 30,000. The film was selected for official screenings in more then 22 international film festivals in 2015 and won many awards. In 2018 Pavel Khvaleev released this third feature film, „Involution“, and in 2020 he finished his horror feature film „Sleepless Beauty”.

Director’s statement by Pavel Khvaleev

“It is perfectly clear to everyone that contemporary society has crossed the red line of impunity and the borders between the do’s and don’ts ceased to exist long ago for a certain social unit – those who selected the dark side of the Internet. If you watch “Sleepless Beauty” film, you’ll have a chance to observe an allusion for a sacrifice, which shows how consciousness of a virgin girl was used and then destroyed in favor of a very subtle weapon from the psychological point of view. By design, due to intervention into the brain division responsible for face recognition, the identification process is disturbed and the visible image for the examinee is fully replaced. We decided to create this story when learned about one medical case, which occurred in October 2012, when a patient saw completely different face features of the doctor due to irritation of some temporal lobe zones.

But in this story, the surgical operation itself is not so important as its background. For the physical intervention the personality shall be fully devastated and consciousness should be able to accept a new image instead of the former one. Only then the substitution process will be completed successfully. Dramatics of this situation lies in the fact that the selected sacrifice dies by the most loved one’s hand. This is a superweapon of our age. The videos demonstrated to the main lady character during the entire confinement period were carefully selected. They include fully assembled and animated images of body pieces, photo inserts, animal parts and many other things obtained just from the Internet space. The author of this work is Yakov Ivanusa, a Ukrainian artist. Working on the musical part I wished the audience feel a real anxiety. Each sound underlines the condition of strain and hopelessness experienced by the main lady character. As a whole, the movie concept shoes that everyone may turn out to be a lamb on the sacrificial table of the today technologies.

Original title: Ya ne splyu

Director: Pavel Khvaleev

ScreenplayAleksandra Khvaleeva

Actors: Polina Davydova, Evgeniy Gagarin, Olivia Indik, Sergey Shegolsky, Andrey Tereshenko, Sergey Topkov

Producer: Frank Ellrich, Georgiy Smirnov, Elena Talyanskaya

Executive Producer: Evgeniya Mustafina

Cinematography: Pavel Khvaleev

Editing: Pavel Khvaleev

Production Design: Oleg Mustafin

Sound Department: Maxim Kuplyanin

Special Effects: Anna Batalova, Oleg Mustafin

Visual Effects: Pavel Khvaleev

Animation Department: Jakov Ivanusa

Costume Design: Marina Pushkova

Makeup Departement: Elena Erina, Viktoria Griban, Evgenia Komissarova

Music: Erase Me

 

Production company: Monomania Films

Year of production: 2020

Genre: Horror

Country: Russland

Language: Russisch

Synchronisations: English, German

Subtitles: English

 

Length: 84 Min

Rating: FSK 18

Aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Sound: Stereo

Resolution: Full HD

Other titles:

German: Schlafende Schönheit – Gefangen im Alptraum

English: I’m Not Asleep (Alternative title)

Polnisch: Tylko nie zaśnij

Russisch: Я не сплю

Filmlabel: M-Square Pictures

Blu-Ray & DVD start: May 28, 2021

VoD-Start: May 28, 2021

Torture Porn

The torture film, also called “torture porn”, is probably the hardest subgenre in the horror field – it is not only about good versus evil anymore, but rather about torturing innocent victims. The “mother” of all torture films is “Saw” (2004) by director James Wan. It shocked viewers so much with its drastic torture scenes that it became a style-setter for the genre. And it enjoyed such popularity among horror fans that it founded a whole series with seven sequels so far. The killer “Jigsaw” became an icon of the genre, his sheer endless inventiveness produced the most perfidious torture traps. “Hostel” by Eli Roth, produced by Quentin Tarrantino among others, also found a great deal of favour with horror audiences in 2005, which is why it too has already received two sequels. Here it’s naive backpackers who become the plaything of a sadistic killer. The two films unleashed a whole wave of comparable films: In “Choose” (2010), a psychopath puts his defenceless victims to the agony of choosing which person close to them he should kill or which body part they are most willing to do without. In “Panic Button” (2011), a group of young people mistakenly believe that they have won a shopping trip to the USA via a social network – but before going, they have to prove themselves in a brutal game.

With “The Collector” from 2009, the makers of the later “Saw” films already took the concept to the extreme: in a house littered with traps, a masked serial killer plays a sinister game of cat and mouse. “Truth or Dare” (2012) asks what happens when the party game of “truth or dare” gets out of control. The sub-genre still enjoys great popularity, another sequel to the “Saw” series has been announced for 2021.

Sleepless Beauty | Trailer (German) ᴴᴰ

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Sleepless Beauty | Trailer (English) ᴴᴰ

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Press Reviews

“Director Pavel Khvaleev manages to make the setting of just one room feel both painfully small and terrifyingly expansive all at the same time, and […] holds the audience’s attention and ramps the tension up and down as needed.” (Crpwrites.com)

“Dressed up in familiar horror movie clothes, Sleepless Beauty’s commentary comes in like a pistol shot and leaves its trail of destruction quickly and efficiently, exposing our bottom-feeding social media-fueled selves for what we might be: a bunch of depraved people on the sidelines watching as blood is spilled for nothing.” (Dcfilmdom.com)

“Sleepless Beauty is definitely a film that will remain on your mind for a few days after watching, and not exactly in a soothing way, as the film’s disturbing and mean and weird – and all of this is meant as an utter compliment.” (Searchmytrash.com)

“Sleepless Beauty is a very insane film in a good way as we are part of this journey that changes the mind to a point where it leads to madness.” (Worldfilmgeek.com)

Technical specifications

Image format: Full HD, 16: 9 (Aspect Ratio: 2.39: 1) | Total running time approx. 84 min | Sound formats: German DTS 5.1, Russian DTS 5.1 | Bonus materials: O-Trailer, Behind the Scenes (5:54 min), Deleted Scene (1:38 min), Alternative Scene: Hallucination (3:06min) | Rating: FSK 18

News

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