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Don't Go To Sleep

1982, Movie, NR, 96 mins

Don't Go To Sleep: Review

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Hidden behind a generic and instantly forgettable title lies a tight, genuinely scary made-for-TV thriller about a family unraveling under the stress of a child's death. Still grieving the recent loss of their eldest daughter, Jennifer (Kristin Cumming), Laura (Valerie Harper) and her husband, Phillip (Dennis Weaver), have moved their surviving children, high-strung, 12-year-old Mary (Robin Ignico) and nine-year-old prankster Kevin (Oliver Robins), to a new house in hopes of starting afresh. The only hitch is that Laura's cantankerous mother, Bernice (Ruth Gordon), is no longer able to live on her own and is moving in with them. Still, Phillip's new job and the change of surroundings promises some relief from the sorrow of the past year, even if the house number is 13666. But something is amiss: Mary has nightmares and, shortly after they settling in, her bed mysteriously catches fire in the middle of the night. The culprit seems to be a frayed lamp cord, but Mary's insistence that she saw Jennifer under the bed sets everyone's nerves on edge. The fire, coupled with Mary's continuing odd behavior, exacerbates the tensions that lie beneath the family's apparently loving surface: Laura wants to send Mary to a therapist, but Phillip refuses for fear that word will get back to his new boss; Bernice taunts Phillip about his increasingly heavy drinking and Phillip accuses Bernice of undermining him. And no-one will talk about Jennifer or the circumstances of her death. Soon after, Bernice suffers a fatal heart attack brought on by finding Kevin's iguana, Ed, in her bedroom; Kevin swears that Ed couldn't have escaped on his own. Laura gradually begins to suspect that Mary is behind the ongoing series of tragedies, but could Jennifer be haunting her own family and making her younger sister the scapegoat? Depite the inherent limitations of broadcast television movies, this original teleplay by Ned Wynn's (son of veteran actor Keenan Wynn and older brother of screenwriter Tracy Keenan Wynn) is unusually subtle and maintains suspense as to the nature of the family's troubles until the very last scene. Harper — a versatile actress who found herself typecast after playing the brassy Rhoda Morgenstern for a total of eight years on TV's Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off, Rhoda — gives a sensitive, thoroughly convincing performance as the increasingly anguished Laura and child actress Ignico is memorably creepy as Mary. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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