The Perfect Sleep review (DVD) ★★

An unnamed man in a trenchcoat and a trilby is beaten to within an inch of his life by Russian gangsters . Brought back to the city by love, he sets out to find the girl he grew up with and must run the gauntlet of his past catching up with him in the process. But who is more of a threat, the Rajah, another childhood friend, or Nikolai, the man who may or may not be his father?

To be perfectly honest, it’s kind of hard to care. Anton Pardoe plays the unnamed protagonist and also wrote the script for this labyrinthine noir thriller. In some ways, The Perfect Sleep is classic noir – plenty of shadows, a femme fatale and an impressive prosaic quality to the dialogue. There’s also an ongoing narration from Pardoe which gives it that hard-boiled feel of a Raymond Chandler story. But because the background is so complicated, exposition comes almost entirely from this voiceover so it ends up feeling a bit like an audio book with some nice visuals.

Perhaps the main problem though is that there’s not much of a mystery to get your teeth into, and as a result, little to engage. Our hero is tough, resourceful and has a heart full of sorrow but for all this he doesn’t engender any empathy or even sympathy and so interest wanes long before the end. Pardoe and indeed the rest of the cast are fine and the fight scenes, of which there are many, are brutal, bloody and realistic(ish). But despite looking good and feeling like a film noir at times, The Perfect Sleep lacks the substance to elevate it above a so-so gangster feature.