Movie Review: Watch Me Sleep

Watch Me Sleep Movie Review by Matt Boiselle

Watch Me Sleep – directed by John Williams (also wrote) and Steve Wood, and starring Darren McAree, James Whitehurst & Sarah Wynn Kordas

Synopsis: After the death of his mother, a son has a webcam installed into her coffin to watch her eternal slumber, but his mother doesn’t stay entombed forever.

Grief is a funny thing sometimes, and it affects everyone in different fashions – after the loss of a loved one some people can resort to some fairly heavy tactics in order to assist with the process, and in “Watch Me Sleep”, the co-directorial chiller from John Williams and Steve Wood, we get to see a rather unusual device, and its rattling results.

The movie follows Sean (McAree), a recovering alcoholic whose mother has just passed away, and to say that Sean’s bereavement has been “less than minimal” would be a criminal understatement – the man literally spits in her casket during a viewing at the funeral home…how’s that for last respects? Turns out that dear ol’ mommy was less than the ideal parent – abuse and neglect were just some of the lighter topics that Sean has mentioned while in group therapy, and his deciding move before her burial was to pay a company to install a web-cam in her coffin, so that from time to time he could randomly check in “just to make sure she’s still really dead” – I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen that one printed in a sympathy card before. The majority of the film is watching to see how life trods along for Sean, with his ongoing battle against the bottle, his past trauma issues with his mother, and now the innate feeling that she may (or may not be) really gone from this world. His indecision of whether or not to press play on the webcam to see if mom’s still in the box is not without tenseness, and when the ultimate moment hits when we see her shift her gaze towards the lens is utterly macabre to its core.

The film doesn’t go above and beyond to shock the hell out of the audience consistently, and nor should it, but it doses out those small bits of dread and bother that deliver a message of multiple acts of human response to unsettling elements. McAree is so powerful and convincing in this role that it’s frightening – in one particular scene in therapy he tells off a fellow addict just what he dealt with as a child in his home and it’s with dominant precision, even so much that I had to replay the entire speech just to take it all in again. His character starts to slide off the rails in the film’s latter stages with paralyzing nightmares, accusations against longtime friends, and even returning to the demon that he’s tried so hard to avoid – the bottle itself. “Watch Me Sleep” is without a doubt under the classification of a horror movie, make no mistake, but its sub-structure is one that can absolutely be considered as horrific in essence as well. This is one of those films that I plan on revisiting again and again, without fail.

“Watch Me Sleep” is currently available for pre-order through mvdshop.com and will release on April 21, 2026 on DVD format.