Near the beginning of indie noir homage The Perfect Sleep, the nameless Narrator drives off after having brutally killed an enemy and his voiceover warns us: “Some of you clever types might think this was one of those stories where everything kinda makes sense in the end. Wrong.” When I first heard that line, I thrilled a little inside, because there should always be some level of non-sense-making in a noir film, especially one that sets itself up as a cross between the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and the moody thoughtfulness of Fyodor Dostoevsky. And especially one whose director, Jeremy Alter (directing his first feature), co-produced David Lynch’s Inland Empire, one of the most deliriously amazing pseudo-incomprensible films of all time. But when the narrator speaks these words, what he really means is that very little is going to make any sense, ever – and that’s not necessarily as good a thing as I was hoping. On the good side, what the film lacks in narrative flow it very nearly makes up for in visual panache.
Read the rest of this review at Row Three (please comment over there as well)
