Two Gates of Sleep (Alistair Banks Griffin, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Paula Gomez. Viewed at the AFI Film Festival 2010, Hollywood.

Two Gates of Sleep tells the story of two brothers and their mother who live in the woods. It is beautifully filmed and although there isn’t very much dialog in it I’d recommend it for it’s romanticized portrayal of what it’s like to live in the wild. The silent scenes stand out and represent the isolation that these three characters are enduring in the woods. Nevertheless they appear to be content and self-sufficient until their mother dies. It is then, that the two brothers embark on journey to burry their mother how she would have wanted to, somewhere deep in the middle of the forest. The diegetic sounds of nature are overpowering and the sporadic non-diegetic music is quite loud and of a synthetic nature, the latter somehow provoking deep emotions from the viewer as he or she witnesses beautiful but overwhelming depictions of these two brothers in the middle of nowhere.

Two Gates of Sleep is set in Louisiana, Mississippi swamps and the pine forest. The first scene introduces the brothers smoking at their kitchen table and thinking. They don’t say a word but instead prep their riffles and head outside to go hunting. It is a very beautiful long and slow scene and it preps the viewer for a collection of other slow scenes in which every color, angle, and mise-en-scene detail can be appreciated. The story subsequently develops as the two bothers find a deer, kill it, skin it, and then make deer soup out of it. We find out that their mother is mentally unstable. There is a scene in which the mother is cutting one of her son’s hair and she barely is cutting any hair at all, then walks to the side and stares at nothing.  Shortly after that scene, her sons find her all of a sudden dead laying down on the ground in the middle of nowhere. The thematic roles of life, death, and isolation that govern this movie make it appealing to the melancholic and existential type of viewer.

I recommend this film for its silence and grand scenery help the viewer contemplate on our fragility in comparison to the greatness of nature. The director happens to be a painter and therefore truly sees filmmaking an art form. This is a banquet to the eye.  The browns that represent earth, the greens that represent life, and the blues that could represent hope in this picturesque film will tell you a story set in an enchanting wilderness.