Sadly Over-hyped

A Masterpiece!

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

this is a documentary about sleep paralysis, not an educational film on the medical science and history of the phenomenon, but a series of narratives by people who have experienced it firsthand and their interpretations of their experiences the documentary is intended to scare, with an accompaniment to the interviews and short re-enactments of primarily minimalist, suspenseful synth and droning/pulsating percussive noise by composer Jonathan Snipes. the interviewees are all fairly articulate, the film is well-edited and the monster/(dream) entity designs and costumes for the re-enactments are artfully haunting the film is very effective at what it sets out to do, namely exploring a phenomena people throughout the world, including the director, have experienced and its effects on their beliefs and personalities it inspires a large enough fraction of the fear and contemplation in the viewer that the phenomena itself must inspire in those who experience it firsthand to make it well worth watching and recommending

Director Rodney Ascher created this film about eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis. It recreates their nightmares and examines their difficulties with a healthy dose of nightmarish movie clips. This movie is stuck in between. It's not strictly a documentary. The characters are played by regular-looking actors. With the recreations, this tries to look like a documentary but is never convincing as such. On the other end, this movie has no plot. It has no narrative. It has no thrills. It's just a series of recreations. I would rather have a straight-forward documentary or a found-footage horror. This is somewhere in the middle where nothing really works.

Sleep paralysis is not fun for those suffering from it. So was it time to do a documentary about it, to raise awareness for it? Maybe - or maybe not, especially considering that there is no real solution at hand. But maybe just the fact that the people who suffer had a chance to talk about this publicly helped them or their families a little bit (though don't get it twisted, cure is not in sight).This is no documentary as you come to know them. There is a lot of things that are being visualized, for the viewers benefit. So they can "feel" what the interviewees are going through. That kind of works, but also may set a horror frame, that some people were not expecting to get. So while this is not declared a horror movie, it may be seen as such by some. Be aware of that ... also this references a couple of movies, some handling sleep paralysis (even in small dialog like in the Original Nightmare on Elm Street). Still while all is sort of interesting to a point, I'm not sure there is enough to hold your attention for the whole running time ...

I've had sleep paralysis (SP) for ages, since I was a boy. It is a recurrent thing for me. Yes, SP can be a terrifying experience. It can create a very vivid and a extremely intense feeling of dread and horror.But once one learns that SP is a sleep disorder, it is only one's brain playing tricks and that it is a benign experience (no one dies of it) and that it is not supernatural and there are no devils, evil spirits involved, it gets much easier to deal with it. But in this pseudo-documentary, the producers, writers decided to use a mystical, religious bias to describe and interpret SP. There is very little science, no actual effort is made to explain SP in scientific terms.This documentary is for the folks who do not believe in evolution and still think that Earth is flat, and that SP is related to alien abductions, spiritual events or all this new age mumbo-jumbo. The Wikipedia page about Sleep Paralysis is much, much better and more enlightening than this pseudo-documentary made, it seems, in the dark ages.