Sleepover LA
2014 · 15m · USA
Directed by Lily Baldwin
Genres: drama, experimental, fantasy
Tones: dark, surreal, theatrical
An innocent tourist travels to LA to lay her sister's ashes to rest, but over one blurred night at The Standard Hotel the past and present collide and she relives her sister Jessica's last night alive. Through stylized dance, a bold original score and an eccentric cast, she is drawn into a world she never knew existed.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects a grief narrative, so Baldwin goes full fever dream—dance, Mark degli Antoni's warped score, a hotel that becomes a character—and refuses to let you know what's memory and what's hallucination. It's the kind of "wait, WHAT?" that feels dangerous instead of precious.
The film's tonal architecture is rigorous: each stylized dance sequence reads as both lament and spatial argument, the Standard Hotel functioning as a twentieth-century lineage play (Aronofsky's visual language meets Fosse's compositional control), grounded in a score that contests the emotional register at every turn.
That score by degli Antoni—the way it sits *against* the movement rather than supporting it—is the decision that cracks the whole film open; it forces the dance to mean something other than what we're trained to feel, and suddenly a 15-minute hotel descent becomes something you can't look away from.
Festivals
- SXSW Film Festival 2014
- Berlinale EFM 2014