Chasing Sleep (2001)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Good concept, poorly executed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I found this for me unknown flick at a sell-out of a rental shop. Somehow it attracted me and let me say this, I didn't regret it. The main lead and for most part in visual is Jeff Daniels. He already had a lot of movies but none of them was made for me. It was with a bit of fear that I plugged it in just to see an average thriller or maybe a horror. Let me tell you it's not average. It's a superb performance by Daniels. Chasing Sleep was also the work of Michael Walker writer and director. And being his first full feature well he's someone to look forward to. But 10 years later he's still hasn't made another flick, well, one in post-production...The movie isn't really made for everybody. It's a slow story but every minute works. You can guess what's going on but again, slowly the story evolves. And the camera work is also slowly, wide-angle slowly zooming in. Some parts did remind me of David Lynch. The weirdness of the story. Every actor is so believable. The fragility of Sadie (Emily Bergl). I really enjoyed it from the first second until the end credits. You are really into it from the beginning. I wasn't 'chasing sleep' while watching it.

Just one meaningless, inscrutable scene after another. I was quite confident that it would all come together in the end, which is why I was looking forward to its conclusion. There are several ways to interpret everything that was seen (almost none of which may have actually happened) but I wasn't able to come up with anything harmonious. So my consternation spiked when all I saw was a dark hole, and the credits rolled.The main character has a lot of episodes which are clearly delusions, but then there are many rational-looking scenes some of which are contradicted by other rational-looking scenes.Anyone who likes this movie cannot care one toss about the plot, since in the end, the only thing we can be sure of is that Jeff Daniels thinks therefore he is.

Just saw this and wanted to add my interpretation of the sex scene.At first, he's really into it. You'll notice, though, that when things really start heating up (i.e. she goes down on him), he starts hearing voices and having flashbacks. This is because the pleasure he's experiencing is also causing the powerful memories he's been suppressing with the drugs to come flooding back (pleasure/pain = same area of the brain, the hypothalamus, part of the limbic system which also controls rage and memory). That is why he has to stop the sex; it conjures the return of painful memories of his act of rage that his mind has repressed.An interesting definition found online: "pleasure-pain principle - (psychoanalysis) the governing principle of the id; the principle that an infant seeks gratification and fails to distinguish fantasy from reality" Basically here is a character who has been numbing his mind with drugs to block out the memory of his act of rage, and has become delusional and lost his sense of time (side effects of sleep deprivation). He is no longer able to separate fantasy from reality. Many of the characters are figments of his imagination/projections of his guilt, which is why they all act similarly and are all also popping pills (they are extensions of himself).

This movie was horrible because I had no clue what was going on at any given moment. I bought this movie strictly because Julian McMahon starred in it and he was only in the movie for like five minutes which was very disappointing. I did look forward to his scenes, though which gave me some excitement. I did not understand the plot of the movie nor the ending. Jeff Daniels played a pretty decent part considering I paid more attention to Julian McMahon's little parts. I should have rented this movie first before I bought it. If you are looking for a lot of Julian McMahon scenes, don't buy this movie. He was only in two scenes in the entire movie and you hear his voice on the telephone once. Oh, and by the way, they misspelled Julian McMahon's name on the DVD cover. They spelled it MacMahon but at the end of the movie, they spelled it McMahon.