Sing soprano and I’ll cut you off at the knees, kid!
In The Sleeper (2000) elderly Violet Moon has been earning a bit on the side by running seances, those wee little dramas wherein a medium, or gatekeeper to the spirits of the dead, speaks to said dead for the benefit of those living who loved the dead.
Or just makes shit up, as Harry Houdini might have said.
But Violet neither foresees or even sees older adopted sister, Cath, acquired when her father married Cath’s mother. But, then, this is not a surprise: Cath has been in and out of prisons and asylums since the day, as a child, she clumsily bumped her mother off the top floor of a castle to the waiting stone floor, below.
Cath knows she’s clumsy because, well, her mother had told her that for all her life. Up to that point.
But at the seance, Cath, visiting from the old folks’ home with roommate Lillian, recognizes Violet. Violet, who went on to marry a dairy farmer, have a son, Fergus, and daughter, >name forgotten<, be widowed, and now is fighting to keep the farm going, despite various challenges.
Challenges that have discouraged Fergus into considering selling out, as his wife encourages.
But when Cath arrives to settle accounts with Violet, she disappears. Soon, Lillian and another oldster, George, arrive, find nothing, and are shooed away – but the nephew of Fergus has found a possession of Cath’s laying in the workyard.
And then Fergus’ wife goes missing, in the midst of a storm.
And what is going on with Fergus and who I think is his … sister?
And the poor old cops, having to deal with … poo slurry.
For all this interesting and mystifying plot, I never really got hooked by the story. Perhaps the British culture is off-putting for me, for the acting and script and sense of humor are fairly fine. But, taken as a whole, there’s a certain unpleasant sordidness to it, as if everyone has a dirty secret hidden in their knickers. Hell, even the administrator of the old folks’ home was, well, a bit repulsive.
But, as I said, it’s all nicely done. Sordidness with, ah, style?
