Winter Sleepers

Having varied the same kinetic thriller three times in 80 minutes in Run, Lola, Run, German director Tom Tykwer probably figured he had a little extra time to kill in his next feature. The result, Winter Sleepers, doesn't have Lola's showy efficiency, and it meanders in its dreamy two hours. The question you're left with is not how he did it but what it means.

Sleepers is the name of a bar in a snowy German village from which a drunken René (Ulrich Matthes) stumbles as he heads home. Along the way he passes a sports car whose door is ajar because its owner, Marco (Heino Perch), was in such haste to get inside and make love with his girlfriend, Rebecca (Floriane Daniel). René steals the car and drives Theo (Josef Bierbichler) off the road. The accident puts Theo's young daughter in hospital, where she's treated by Rebecca's roommate Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem), a nurse who has trouble remembering her lines as Blanche in an amateur production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Theo, meanwhile, cannot forget the radiant, snake-like scar he saw just before losing consciousness.

That's just the beginning; the rest follows like the house that Jack built by way of Kieslowski, though without the former's logic or the latter's elegance. Tykwer nonetheless knows how to show the interplay of memory, time, and destiny, even if his telling details sometimes get muddled by broad strokes. As in Lola, this film's strength is as much character as technique; these sleepers will keep you up.

-- Peter Keough