The Rehabilitation of Sleep (2014) watch online HD

I loved this short film, its painterly quality, the mood, the imagery and the story. Remarkably, it's only two minutes long.

The paintings used for the film mix realism and surrealism, used for the awaken and the dream respectively. Bosch' Garden of Earthly Delights and some images by contemporary Polish surreal graphic artists immediately came to mind. Shaffner is an amazing painter. I loved the airiness, freshness and realism of the imagery for the awaken life, and the dark rich complexity of the images of the oneiric part of the film. I also loved the way the film is able to capture the anxiety one feels when having insomnia, and also the peaceful but "noisy" world of the dreamworld.

This being a time-lapse animation, we can expect some level of delayed motion, so to speak. Despite this being the case also here, the film has a natural flow that comes from the narrative and the images per se not as much from the animation, so I didn't mind it.

I wanted to know more about the character, what causes his insomnia and why he lives in an empty apartment. Certainly, we can get parts of whom he is from the many visual elements that populate his dream; however, the language of dreams is symbolic and very specific to the individual who dreams them, dreams are like a palimpsest language, so not always easy to get or access.

Overall, a mesmerizing short film.