Sleepworking
2013 · 16m
Directed by Gavin Williams
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
In the near future, a young woman works as a sleepworker, her body performing menial jobs while she sleeps, until disturbing side effects send her to uncover what sleepworkers really do.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sci-fi premise that actually inverts the usual power fantasy—instead of the body being the prison, consciousness becomes the irrelevant passenger—and it commits to the body horror implications most filmmakers would sanitize into neat thriller beats. Williams leans into the wrongness rather than resolving it, which is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes other scouts nervous and me certain.
The film situates itself deliberately within the lineage of body-horror SF and workplace dystopia, tracing back through Videodrome and Brazil, but executes its own formal restraint—the editing refuses sensationalism even as the premise demands it, creating a tension between form and content that elevates it beyond premise-driven exploitation.
The turning point is the sound design in the sequences where her waking mind tries to reclaim agency over her sleeping body—that specific choice of what we hear versus what we see is what separates this from a dozen other sleep-based thrillers and makes the disorientation feel genuinely nauseating rather than just conceptually clever.