The Wages of Walking

The late Hayden Panettiere's final role was in 2026's Sleepwalker, a dismally written, nihilistic film about a woman being haunted by her dead child and her not dead husband. Her performance in the lead role isn't bad and the first third of the film has a little effective creepiness. But writer/director Brandon Auman doesn't have the chops for sustained quality and the film dissolves into a lazy, mean-spirited soap opera.

We're introduced to Sarah (Panettiere) comforting her distraught eight or nine year old daughter, who has had a terrifying experience sleepwalking. But then we learn it is in fact Sarah who's been sleepwalking and her daughter is dead. She still has a little boy of about the same age and the two of them are staying with Sarah's mother, Gloria (Beverly D'Angelo). Sarah's an artist who's been producing a series of disturbing paintings lately (I actually kind of liked her paintings). Her abusive husband, Michael (Justin Chatwin), is in a coma, but his ghost still stalks her to cause her psychological distress. He was still her husband because, the first time she tried to separate from him, he beat her up in front of their little boy and thereafter refused to give her a divorce.

We see Sarah watching the original Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls and I felt like Auman was pointing to them as influences but Sleepwalker lacks the psychological depth of either. The climax of the film falls totally flat because Auman is counting on the impact of a twist that really adds up to nothing. Most of all, Sarah's sleepwalking actively detracts from her character development somehow. I think Auman wanted her to be like the protagonist of Carnival of Souls, whose supernatural problem ties intimately and effectively with her psychological problem but Sarah just seems like a lady being randomly tortured.

Auman's previous credits, I was surprised to see, mainly involved animation. He was a writer on Star Wars: Resistance. So I guess we can't blame that show's mediocrity entirely on Disney's overbearing committee.