It’s likely happened to you a few times, and maybe it happens a lot more than that. It’s three o’clock in the morning. You had a long day, and you’re exhausted. But you’ve been lying there, wide awake, for hours now. You’ve got insomnia.
Insomnia is an affliction that affects almost everyone at some point, and for chronic insomnia sufferers, it can be incredibly disruptive. Even just not getting quite enough sleep for a couple of nights running is enough to throw one’s days into chaos. There’s a huge industry devoted to helping us get enough sleep: high-tech mattresses, white noise machines, meditation apps, and nutritional supplements.
A lack of sleep can make a person behave in all manner of strange ways. These are the ten best movies about what happens when you aren’t getting your full eight hours.
10 Insomnia (1997)
When you are trying to sleep, it helps for it to be as dark as possible. But the Norwegian film Insomnia is set in the town of Tromsø, which, being in the Arctic Circle, boasts two months of constant sunlight every summer. Officer Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård) is a former Swedish police officer who washed up in Norway after a sex scandal at work, so things are already not going terribly well for him. While investigating the murder of a teenager, Engström accidentally shoots his partner while in pursuit of the suspect, and the resulting guilt he feels after the killing (and his desperate attempts to cover it up) plus the relentless daylight push him further and further into a state of sleeplessness.
By the time that Engström finds, to his horror, that the suspect witnessed him killing his partner, he has begun to hallucinate due to the lack of sleep. Christopher Nolan remade the film in 2002, set in Alaska for the midnight sun, and starring Al Pacino in the Engström role.
9 The Machinist (2004)
Christian Bale went hard on body transformation for his role as a factory worker named Trevor, losing a terrifying 62 pounds in preparation. Trent has been suffering from insomnia for a year, and if his appearance and demeanor weren’t scaring his co-workers already, he makes a mistake at work that causes a colleague to lose an arm. Trent was distracted by another co-worker named Ivan, but the problem is that no one else knows who Ivan is, or has even seen him.
Beginning to believe that someone is trying to purposefully drive him out of his mind, Trent becomes obsessed with finding Ivan, to the point of hurling himself in front of Ivan’s car, so he can accuse him of a hit-and-run. His involvement with a woman named Maria and her son Nicholas seems to be the key to finding out who Ivan is, and maybe, finally, getting some sleep.
8 Fight Club (1999)
The Narrator (Edward Norton) cannot sleep. He’s unhappy at work, and unhappy with all the material goods that he has been consistently told will make him happy. The only thing he really enjoys is going to support groups, even though he has none of the afflictions of the other members. He first meets Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter), a fellow looky-loo at his support groups, and then Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman that the narrator moves in with after an explosion at his apartment.
Tyler and the Narrator start attempting to feel more alive by fighting each other, and then expand the idea to include other men, calling the gathering Fight Club, which they hold in a bar basement. The Narrator quits his job to commit more fully to Fight Club, which has grown into a whole movement that quickly spirals out of Tyler and the narrator’s control. Tyler is sleeping with Marla, which the Narrator has some feelings about, but it’s when everyone starts calling the narrator Mr. Durden that the narrator realizes he’s had a break with reality, and that he is Tyler Durden. Insomnia can make you do some strange things.
7 The Haunting (1999)
Jan de Bont’s horror film was the second to be based on Shirley Jackson’s famous 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House; the first was released in 1963. Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Owen Wilson star as a doctor (Neeson) and patients involved in a scientific study of insomnia taking place at a particularly gloomy mansion in Massachusetts called Hill House. Or so the patients think: Dr. Marrow really wants to study the effects of fear, and he has plans to frighten the group, beginning with telling them the very sad story of the house’s past and its owner, Hugh Crain.
Nell (Taylor) was already the most highly strung of the patients, having spent the past decade caring for her ill mother, only to be disinherited when she died. She is convinced that the house is truly haunted, even after Marrow reveals the true nature of the study. Insomnia is the perfect gateway for horror of every kind: when you’re up late, and everyone else is asleep, every floorboard creak and bump in the night is a message from the supernatural.
6 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
There are times when you can’t sleep, and then there are times when you shouldn’t sleep, and that encapsulates pretty much the whole A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The original 1984 film still stands as one of the best horror films ever, because we can all identify with nightmares. Nancy, Tina, and Glen all had horrific dreams the night before, although Tina is the only one who woke up with slashes on her nightgown.
Thus begins a horrifying chain of events: dreams about a man with a mangled face wearing a glove with bladed fingertips, after which the dreamer gets bloodily killed in their sleep. Tina, her boyfriend Rod, and Glen all succumb one by one as Nancy desperately tries to stay awake long enough to figure out how to survive.
5 You Shall Not Sleep (2018)
Starring Belén Rueda (star of The Orphanage), this internationally co-produced horror film is all about sleep, specifically what the lack of it can do to a person. Rueda is Bianca, a member of an experimental theater group in the '80s investigating higher levels of perception through sleep deprivation, and developing a play from their findings. The group settles in an abandoned mental hospital to try and unlock that higher perception, but they wind up disturbing the former residents of the hospital instead, with dark psychological implications for all involved.
4 Taxi Driver (1976)
On one level, Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 film is about the dangers of not sleeping. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) drives a taxi on the night shift, as he’s unable to sleep anyway. He’s got a front-row seat to the worst of the city: crime, prostitution, pornography, and poverty. Combined with his unsuccessful love life and increasingly violent thoughts, Bickle becomes a crude sort of vigilante, killing a robber before an aborted attempt at assassinating a presidential candidate and then getting in a shootout to save a young sex worker (Jodie Foster).
Grievously injured and hailed as a hero, things seem to be turning around for Bickle, but a disturbing moment at the end implies that the old Travis is still in there.
3 Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Taking place mostly halfway between midnight and dawn, Ingmar Bergman’s eerie, unsettling 1968 film stars longtime Bergman collaborator Max von Sydow as a painter named Johan Borg who lives on an island with his wife Alma (Liv Ullman). His insomnia has been causing him visions so vivid that he begins to draw them and give them names, and Alma begins to worry so much for his sanity that she begins to stay awake with him.
He tells her about ‘vargtimman’, or the hour of the wolf, which is the time of night when the most people are born, and when the most people die. Alma tries to hold on to Johan as he slips into madness, but he ends up being pursued to his death by his demons.
2 Whirlpool (1950)
Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney) seems to have everything, being married to a successful psychoanalyst. But she has a secret: she’s a kleptomaniac. She’s caught but avoids prosecution when a hypnotist named Korvo (José Ferrer) intervenes. Her guilt causes her to start experiencing insomnia, which only increases when, under the guise of helping her with her kleptomania and trouble sleeping, Korvo begins to use Ann for his own devices, namely, framing her for the murder of his former lover Theresa.
1 Light Sleeper (1992)
In Paul Schrader’s 1992 neo-noir, Willem Dafoe is John LeTour, a delivery man for a high-class drug dealer named Ann (Susan Sarandon), but it’s looking like he might lose his job. Aimless and tortured by increasing insomnia, he meets up with his ex, Marianne (Dana Delaney), with whom he had an intense yet volatile relationship, clouded by drug abuse.
At the same time, LeTour comes into contact with (and under police suspicion because of) a client named Tis (Victor Garber), and finds himself caught up in circumstances beyond his control. Sharing similarities with Taxi Driver (see above), which Schrader also wrote, it sees insomnia tied up with addiction, with violent and tragic results.
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