Descriptions:
Sadie has just killed her manipulative billionaire husband and escaped with her daring lover Mercy. But it’s not a fairy tale ending yet: unbeknownest to Mercy, Sadie bares a secret from her, which she can’t bring herself to get rid of. Only, Mercy’s not acting like herself anymore. Someone else is controlling her like a doll.
REVIEW IT ON LETTERBOXED:
https://letterboxd.com/film/plastic-sleep
DIRECTOR’S NOTE:
Plastic Sleep allowed me to play around with some wonderful noir-ish tropes whilst keeping my base firmly in a nightmare. Most of my work is usually based on a want to recapture the magic of a certain kind of movie/genre that doesn’t leave me. In this case it’s my obsession with early 90s erotic thrillers. But of course equally important in my work and…I guess life now is obviously the work of the late great David Lynch.
Mulholland Drive was a conscious influence definitely but there are shades of Lost Highway in this that were less intentional. But playing in that headspace of dream-like identity is so fascinating I suppose it couldn’t help but come up. I had originally hoped for Sadie’s character to be more wistful and dreamlike awe like Meg Tilly in the forgotten ero thriller Masquerade. But as I was writing it I became more necessary to me to fragment their personalities even more and stumped as I was by this writing dilemma, I rewatched Persona and it finally came to me. I had forgotten about how infrequently both women are talking in that film and so it became an obvious inspiration.
As for other influences – Bound was a given: Two lesbian lovers but also a cost saving decision to build only one room of an apartment – hotel room in this case. Sliver is a movie terribly crippled by a weak ending but it did contribute the monitoring villain idea. But more than anything a grand overarching stylistic influence outside of Barbie herself was Todd Haynes’ seminal banned Karen Carpenter movie filmed entirely with dolls. I absolutely adore using puppets and toys for making films. Especially when it’s NOT stop motion. Something about seeing them actually move in real time is so interesting to me.
I’ve always considered making a movie using Barbie dolls. They’re a great size and pretty girls are always fun to photograph. So when I finally saw that movie a fuse went off in my head and I essentially fast tracked this loose idea developing at a lightning speed compared to what I was previously working on. The scale of the dolls and furniture allowed me to get some really interesting lighting going on which allowed for some great nightmarish material and the experience of building everything got me in touch with my long dormant crafting side, culminating in the collage aesthetic of the poster.
Creativity is super valuable to me and I want to nurture it more than I already have. Maybe interesting textural pieces of art is just what I want to live for.
I think it’s a unique little thriller within my catalogue and has some of the more unusual and eerie shots of anything I’ve produced as well as interesting psychology to the characters. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy.