Sleeping Dogs (2013)
Dir. Floris Ramaekers
Starring: Liberty Mills, Jon Campling, David L. Rooney, Candis Nergaard
Sleeping Dogs is a £100-budget London crime thriller by writer/director Floris Ramaekers. Many films of similar description are wheeled out on the British independent circuit each year, and yet, Sleeping Dogs remains unique through its slow-fizzling and contemplative approach. The plot revolves around Eve, a young Londoner who is caretaker to her dangerously ill, catatonic boyfriend Tommy - the victim of a savage doping attack which has left him in a vegetative state. Ramaekers captures the hermetically-sealed world of the rough London neighbourhood where Eve wanders, melancholy and ghost-like, searching for answers. It seems that everyone who occupies this milieu is aggressive and suspicious, particularly when Eve seeks money to pay for a life-saving medical treatment for Tommy. The secrecy and bad blood bubbling beneath the surface suggest that Tommy's history is chequered beyond anyone's imagining.
Liberty Mills, as Eve, gives a quietly affecting, tough-minded performance, remaining tenacious and self-sacrificing until the bitter end. The lurking cast of supporting actors, all relations and associates of Tommy's, make up a fiercely believable rogue's gallery of bloodsuckers and lowlives. In an intimate film like this one, a single miscasting can be jarring, but the ensemble supporting cast of Sleeping Dogs provides no such weaknesses. The unrelentingly grim story remains deeply engaging and watchable, its visual style and quality of performances making it easy to forget the micro-budget. It is also testament to the talents of the director, actors, and crew to create such quality work under such limitations. Its aura of unsettling quietude and lonely malaise, along with its terrible denouement, make Sleeping Dogs an outstanding British independent film, with a thorough aversion to cliché.
