A Dormir Debout
2015 · 7m · France
Directed by Bernard Werber
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, surreal
Caroline, a sleep expert, suffers from bouts of sleepwalking that reveal hidden sides of her personality — a short from the bestselling author of the 'Ants' trilogy.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sleep expert undone by her own sleepwalking is the kind of premise that makes you grin—the contradiction is too perfect, too perverse to ignore. Werber takes the tired 'expert's hypocrisy' trope and warps it into something genuinely unsettling, where the dark comedy sits uncomfortably close to real psychological horror.
The film's formal economy is admirable: seven minutes to establish a protagonist, fracture her identity, and leave us uncertain which version is 'real'—echoes of the fractured-self lineage without ever leaning on exposition. The editing rhythm between waking and sleepwalking states shows considered control over tone.
The single choice that lands here is the tonal shift the moment Caroline falls asleep—a subtle shift in sound design or color that tips us sideways into her other self, where suddenly the constraints dissolve and she becomes someone else entirely, all on a limited canvas.