Genre Drama

The Man Who Sleeps (1974)

Item: The Man Who Sleeps
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — The Man Who Sleeps (1974)

There's a particular kind of film that doesn't so much tell you a story as place you inside a state of mind, and then leave you there. The Man Who Sleeps is exactly that kind of film. It's not entertainment in any conventional sense. It won't give you characters to root for, a plot to follow, or a resolution to satisfy you. What it will do, if you let it, is make you feel the weight of absolute withdrawal from the world in a way that's almost physically uncomfortable. And that, I'd argue, is its own form of brilliance.

Directed by Bernard Queysanne and adapted from Georges Perec's novel, the film follows a young man in Paris who simply stops. He abandons his studies, retreats to a bare rented room, and sets about erasing himself from society. No ambition, no connection, no desire. He makes coffee. He stares out of windows. He walks through empty streets at odd hours. That's more or less it, in terms of plot. What holds the whole thing together is the voiceover, addressed entirely in the second person: "you do this", "you feel nothing", "you walk". It's a strange, alienating device that somehow pulls you closer rather than pushing you away. You're the protagonist. Or rather, the film insists you might be.

Shot in stark black-and-white, every frame here feels like a photograph that's been left out in the cold too long. The compositions are meticulous, almost severe. Objects get as much screen time as the protagonist, the camera settling on a cup, a wall, a pair of shoes with the same blank attention the young man brings to his own existence. It's the kind of formal precision that could easily tip into pretension, but Queysanne earns it. The visual austerity isn't showing off. It's doing the work of making you feel the emptiness rather than simply observe it.

The voiceover sits coolly above all of this, clinical and detached, while underneath something desperate and lonely is slowly building. That contrast is where the film lives. It never tells you how to feel about what you're watching. It just keeps going, accumulating gestures and silences, until the dread creeps in without your permission. I found myself thinking of Lessons of Darkness (1992), another film that weaponises detachment and makes you feel the thing it refuses to name directly. Different in almost every other respect, but there's a shared understanding that sometimes a cool remove hits harder than any conventional emotional appeal.

I do want to be honest about the three stars, though. This is a film I admire more than I loved spending time with. Its deliberate pacing is part of the point, I understand that, but there were stretches where I felt the film repeating itself without adding anything new to the accumulation. The refusal of catharsis is intentional and coherent, but by the final act I was aware of the effort involved in staying with it. That's not necessarily a criticism of the film's ambition, just an honest account of my experience watching it. Respect and pleasure aren't always the same thing.

What strikes me most, looking back on it, is how contemporary it feels despite being fifty years old. The particular flavour of alienation it describes, that voluntary withdrawal into purposelessness, that sense of opting out of a world that feels too loud and too demanding, doesn't feel dated at all. If anything it feels more recognisable now than it probably did in 1974. Perec was onto something, and Queysanne found the right visual language for it.

Three stars. Not a film I'd press on everyone, and I mean that genuinely rather than as a badge of obscure honour. But if you're in the right mood, or the right kind of low place, it might be exactly the film you didn't know you needed. Watch it quietly, alone, probably not on a Friday night. Let it do what it does.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1974 | Watched: 2026-05-06

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