Sleep with Your Eyes Open Review: A Vivid Portrayal of the Migrant Experience

      Note: This review was initially published as a part of our 2024 Berlinale coverage. Sleep with Your Eyes Open will be released in theaters on September 5, 2025.

      Deep within Don DeLillo’s Underworld, there is a conversation between the main character, Nick Shay, and a Jesuit priest who is one of his teachers. The discussion revolves around language. To illustrate the boy’s extremely limited vocabulary, the priest challenges him to name the components of his shoe. Terms like aglet, grommet, vamp, and quarter are completely unfamiliar to Nick, but rather than dismissing the moment, he turns it into a significant awakening. He rushes back to his dorm, eager to look up words, memorize them, spell them, and learn them––for this, DeLillo pointedly remarks, “is the only way in the world you can escape the things that made you.” Throughout Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep with Your Eyes Open, I found myself revisiting that line. In Wohlatz’s film, language serves a similar purpose as in DeLillo’s writing: in a narrative where all characters are attempting to discover themselves in an unfamiliar environment, it acts as both a liberating element and a pathway to self-actualization.

      This theme may also represent Wohlatz’s central motif. Her second feature and solo debut, The Future Perfect (2016), followed a teenager from China as she endeavored to learn Spanish and adapt to life in Buenos Aires. It depicted both an emotional and linguistic journey; as she mastered new tenses, her existence transitioned from the past and present to a hypothetical future. Sleep builds upon and complicates the themes of its predecessor. Wohlatz shifts the setting from Buenos Aires to Recife, Brazil; once again, she focuses her camera on displaced individuals grappling with a foreign language and environment. However, while The Future Perfect was firmly centered on its protagonist’s perspective, Sleep unfolds into a much more multifaceted narrative. Just when it seems to focus on Kai (Liao Kai Ro), a young Taiwanese tourist who arrives in Recife following a breakup, the screenplay – co-written by Wohlatz and Future Perfect collaborator Pío Longo – shifts to a Chinese migrant whom she encounters during her travels, Fu Ang (Shin-Hong Wang), and eventually changes perspectives and timelines again to follow another Chinese newcomer, Xiao Xin (Chen Xiao Xin), who Fu Ang met and fell in love with earlier in his time in Brazil.

      Despite the complex structure, the experience is anything but convoluted. In less capable hands, the layered narrative could easily have felt contrived; however, in Wohlatz’s skilled filmmaking, this winding journey becomes a means of reflecting the nature of the migrant experience itself. People intersect and separate; nothing remains constant, everything is interchangeable, including the undocumented individuals striving to survive in Recife. Fu Ang owns an umbrella store, but the consistently sunny weather spells doom for the business––as soon as he and Kai cross paths, the shop closes, and he vanishes. The intrigue intensifies when Kai discovers a box filled with postcards written by Xiao Xin, functioning as her memoir of her time in Recife. This revelation further splinters the film, allowing for new digressions, characters, stories, and languages to emerge.

      Like all the characters in Sleep, Xiao Xin feels the weight of psychological and geographical disconnection. While Kai mourns a lost love, she grieves the loss of her last adopted homeland, Argentina, where she lived before fleeing to Brazil and learned Spanish, the language she now fears she will forget, and which she insists on using to articulate her thoughts. Her hesitant, accented voiceover aligns her with the teenager at the heart of The Future Perfect; yet, Sleep also dedicates itself to exploring the dislocation experienced by other Chinese migrants around her.

      This flexibility is familiar in Wohlatz’s work, as her films consistently exist at the convergence of diverse geographies, languages, and cinematic styles. What feels notably fresh in her newest film is its fluidity. Sleep exudes a flâneur-like energy; the various perspectives it embraces and the seamless transitions between them reflect Wohlatz’s desire to capture migration as a continuous flow of gestures, bodies, and narratives. This aspect is evident in the film’s form. Yann-Shan Tsai’s elliptical editing effortlessly hops between stories and timelines, mirroring the suspended reality that all the characters––Kai, Fu Ang, Xiao Xin, and a group of workers including a Portuguese polyglot portrayed by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (who also appeared in The Future Perfect)––must navigate. Even the handful of diegetic songs that resonate from speakers and radios, combined with the city’s own soundscape of construction and road work, amplify feelings of dislocation. In a film devoid of a single, coherent narrator, rootlessness becomes a sort of shadow protagonist, drifting