Chasing Sleep

REVIEW
Daniels gives one of his best performances in this creepy psychological thriller/mood piece. He plays an extremely unhappily married professor who wakes up one morning to find his wife hasn't come home from her job. The tension slowly builds as the police and his wife's lover begin to suspect that Daniels did her in, and Daniels himself begins to hallucinate. Meanwhile, he's being hit on by one of his students (Bergl of Carrie 2, here again playing a nerdy-but-sexy teen). Unsettling and a bit depressing, Chasing Sleep never quite achieves the horrific paranoia and insanity that Poe and Polanski brought to very similar material, but it is nonetheless effectively claustrophobic and compelling.