Director – Alberto Mascia, Screenplay – Alberto Mascia & Enrico Sacca, Producers – Andrea Paris, Matteo Rovere, Stefano Sardo & Ines Vasiljevic, Photography – Matteo Vieille Rivara, Music – Federico Bisozzi & Davide Tomat, Visual Effects – Edi (Supervisor – Francesco Pepe) & Hive Division (Supervisors – Erik Caretta & Simone Menagatti), Special Effects – Renato Agostini & Tonino Corridori, Prosthetics – ALCFX (Designer – Andrea Leanza), Production Design – Fabrizio D’Arpino. Production Company – Ascent Film/Nightswim/Amazon Prime/Rai Cinema.
Cast
Stefano Accorsi (Dr David Damiani), Caterina Schula (Viola Conforti), Astrid Meloni (Dr Levi), Paolo Pierobon (Carlo Conforti), Andrea Germani (Dr Andrea Rinaldi), Tony Laudadio (Mattia Costa), Alessandro Gazale (Valli), Giordano De Plano (Elia Treves)
Plot
David Damiani is a psychologist who works with Hypnos, a company that has developed a reform of the penal system where prisoners are placed in cryogenic suspension for the duration of their sentence. The system is controversial and the prisoners themselves are often left confused each time they are brought out of sleep. David is puzzled in having to deal with a prisoner who has been awakened and seems to know David, while no records exist of who the man is. David himself is then awakened out of sleep, having been a prisoner accused of murder. He became involved with Viola, the wife of Carlo Conforti who was sentenced for murdering his secretary. In trying to ascertain Carlo’s innocence or guilt, David switched off Carlo’s stasis capsule, but also ended up killing a woman in the adjoining capsule, leading to him being charged for murder. Released, David seeks to reconnect with Viola but finds himself wound into a conspiracy about what is going on at Hypnos, including the false sentencing of people who have sought to speak out against the company.
Hypersleep is a film about Cryogenics – indeed, the very term ‘hypersleep’ is regularly used in science-fiction to refer to people being placed in cryogenic sleep for purposes like long space voyages. The idea of cryogenic sleep being used as an alternative to a standard prison term has appeared in the Star Trek episode Space Seed (1966) and films like Project: Shadowchaser (1992), Demolition Man (1993) and Lockout (2012), among others. It is an idea that has always seemed an improbable one to me – of people spending 10-20 year sentences or so in frozen suspension and waking up fresh as the day they went in, while their victims are now aged. That said, this is the first treatment of the idea where it is made into a believable scenario – as an alternative to overcrowded prisons where the sleepers do age while in suspension and are periodically brought out to be made to confront their crimes.
Director Albert Maascia’s tone is slow and sombre. It feels like a film that is set up to tell a great conceptual mystery – the initial scenes not far in with Stefano Accorsi puzzling over mystery Prisoner 517 who seems to have no record and with whom Stefano’s girlfriend Caterina Schula seems to have some involvement and even be taunting Stefano about it. All before the abrupt Conceptual Reversal Twist where we find that Stefano is actually one of the prisoners and was charged with murdering 517. It’s a great twist – it reminds of something like Brain Dead/Paranoia (1990) – even if we are not quite sure how it all fits together.
Stefano Accorsi alongside a cryogenic sleeper capsule
On the other hand, after the twist comes, things start falling apart plotwise. You are not quite sure what part of the initial scenes was real or, as the later scenes seem to indicate, was freezer-induced hallucination and memory burn. No real sense is made of the initial scenes once the twist comes. In fact, by the end of Hypersleep you can’t even be sure what aspects of what we just saw were real or not. Stefano Accorsi appears to be rehabilitated from his prison term for killing Paolo Pierobron, re-engages with Paolo’s wife Caterina Schula, seems to uncover corporate secrets and burst in on a minister with a gun. But at the end we are not sure whether any of this actually occurred at all. It ends up with a film of abrupt dogleg twists that make no real sense other than the film’s desire to constantly turn things around on us.
Alberto Mascia had previously made Interferenze (2009), which is listed as a fantasy film, although I am unable to find any other details on it.
