The Spanish horror film You Shall Not Sleep (2018) attracted the attention of many viewers and critics. Someone speaks about the film very well, others criticize. However, it is hard to deny that the ending of the film leaves a lot of questions and makes you look at the whole plot from a different angle.
Let’s try to figure out what is the deep meaning of this non-standard horror.
The plot of the film begins with the story of a young actress named Bianca. She has long dreamed of big roles, but something always gets in her way.
And now she receives an unusual offer. The famous director Alma Bem creates an experimental performance and invites Bianca to play the main role. However, not everything is so simple – Alma’s special method is that in order to better reveal their potential, the actors involved in the play must give up sleep for a while.
The play plays the story of real people – patients in a psychiatric clinic, in the building of which the artists will spend several sleepless days. The production script is based on real events, namely, on the diaries of Dora, a woman with a difficult fate and an unstable psyche, the role of which will be played by Bianca. The notes were made right on the wall of her room.
It is assumed that being in this terrible place in an altered state of consciousness (to which insomnia inevitably leads), the actors will be able to fully feel the stories of their characters, live them.
But instead, Bianca begins to feel and see strange things, and then completely understands that she managed to truly establish contact with something supernatural.
Probably, Alma, the director of an unusual theater, initially really used insomnia to achieve the desired level of skill from the actors. But, during the experiments, the woman noticed that some people, due to long wakefulness, are able to get into limbo, and at that moment the souls of long-dead people take possession of their bodies.
This explains the unusual choice of location. A psychiatric hospital is exactly the place to which lost souls are attached.
It is not clear whether Alma could have known in advance which actors were needed for her purposes. Perhaps she just tried different people, or maybe over the years she learned to feel who exactly could get into limbo. There is also a possibility that only the best actors are capable of this – the ability to try on someone else’s image and transform into another person to the smallest detail allows them to escape into another reality.
Alma’s goals are not fully understood, because she does not have time to finish her monologue. Most likely, she only tried to arouse sincere surprise in the audience. Although sometimes it seems that she really wanted to help the souls stuck in limbo. It’s not just that she pulls out Cecilia, Dora’s daughter?
However, Bianca proves to be too strong. She confronts Dora and does not allow her body to be taken, instead, she, the only one in the entire film, manages to free the woman from limbo.
Most likely, Bianca herself is not even in limbo at this moment, her place there is taken by an astral double. The girl herself at this time in the real world is playing a drama, which she is watching from limbo.
You Shall Not Sleep leaves viewers a lot of room for theories and reflections. But the central idea of the film is the willingness of people to endure extreme discomfort for the sake of creating great creativity.
In the end, the troupe manages to create a unique production that causes a real shock to the audience. But this becomes possible only thanks to the sacrifice that each of the actors made.
