We should have let her sleep

Friday’s events have thoroughly thrown me off my groove. Kindly forgive the lack of post yesterday; I’ll make up for it once again with two today. Which means, hopefully, three films today: one for yesterday’s post, one for today’s post, and one for tomorrow’s post, to rebuild my buffer. Wish me luck.

Last night, I started watching a film that I had to finish this morning. I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoy going through the available catalogue Netflix has for a particular genre and picking a film completely arbitrarily. I saw The Curse of Sleeping Beauty, and being a general lover of fairy-tale retellings, I said “screw it.”

Truthfully, I have to say the visuals in this film were fabulous. That’s the thing that initially drew me to it. The dream space is absolutely stunning, with fantastic costumes, dreamy lighting, beautiful spaces. The “real world,” too, is marked by some mesmerizing mise-en-scene and appealing shot composition. It reminded me in all the best ways of The Fall, another film I’d like to discuss someday, and of S. Darko, the Donnie Darko sequel–Donnie Darko I’ll be talking about, but S. Darko I will not.

Unfortunately, the similarities to S. Darko don’t stop at the visuals. The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is not a good film. I’m sorry to have to say it, but I’m not the first: it has one star on Netflix, a total of three reviews on Metacritic (all negative), and 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. It did manage to scrape a 4.3 on IMDb, though. At any rate, like S. Darko, the plot is meandering and kind of hard to follow. There’s no real substance to the events, and the one and only twist was all too easy to predict. Some of the discussion of the supernatural elements was interesting in general, but largely irrelevant to the plot. The only thing I can say potentially in defense of the story is that it was based on a comic. Perhaps the source is able to spend more time on exposition and tying everything together, where the film chose to cash in on jump scares and disturbing imagery.

I have to say, though, I may have been willing to forgive all of this if the film had had a satisfactory ending. Instead, perhaps the largest reveal of the movie is made, and then the film ends two minutes later. The audience has no time to process, to interpret, to react, and suddenly the credits are rolling. If the intention was to make another film later, I think that is unlikely to happen. If the filmmakers ended it on the same cliffhanger as the most recently published issue, I can kind of understand, but why not simply invent an ending? But if both the comic and the film end the same way, and that is truly the final ending, then I must confess to being extremely disappointed. Overall, The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is beautiful to look at but has zero substance. Not unlike a number of Hollywood actresses.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *