I’m trying to make sure that every one of these posts is going to include something you may not have heard about before. Chasing Sleep is a movie that I’m sure many have never heard of before. Starring Jeff Daniels as Ed, who is such a wildly diverse actor. Many know him from Dumb and Dumber, but this is not the same vibe.

Ed isn’t sleeping. And it is causing a lot of tension in his life. Everything surrounding him appears to be distressed. Physically. Rust on metal. Mold on walls. Stains everywhere. Leaking pipes. Lots of leaks. This movie is so well done, and his acting is spectacular. We can see how the lack of sleep is affecting him, as he muddles through his daily life in a daze. His wife has disappeared. He no longer goes to work. Police are searching for his wife, and he seems genuinely concerned and distressed over her absence. But things get surreal as sleep eludes him.

An interesting sub theme in this deals with pills. Almost everyone who comes into his home winds up popping a pill in his presence. And he is taking whatever he can find to try and get it to knock him out.

This might be classified more as a thriller, but the darkness and tension scream out horror to me. This may come in a little lower on the scale for me, garnering an 8 star rating. But it is a movie that sits on my movie shelf and will absolutely come down and pop into the DVD player every now and then.

If you don’t know the story, it starts with someone waking up in a room that is a perfectly symmetrical cube. Every wall is the same with a portal doorway centered in the middle of it. Including the floor and ceiling. And on the other side of those portals is a room exactly like the one you left. But there are colored LED lighting in each room giving a blue, green, or red tint to them. And to add tension, sometimes the rooms are booby trapped. You don’t want to go into one of those rooms.

Shortly after the movie starts, a group starts to form. People who have no idea how they got trapped in the cube. And they all have a desire to try and escape to get back to their life. There are clues about how to find the exit, because an extra twist is discovered. The rooms move!

The mystery of what the Cube is and how they got there is touched on, but there is no way for it to be explained by those trapped within it. The follow up movie HyperCube doesn’t do much for that either. It tries to capture the feel again with the same thing. More or less. And then Cube Zero takes us back to the origin of the Cube. Who made it? How? Why?

And then I found a board game. Room 25 captures the feel so well. 25 tiles face down, and you are trying to find the escape room. But the game will shift the tiles in at least one direction every round. Great game, I should review it for the site!

As far as the movie goes though, I definitely give this a 10. I love this movie and have watched it at least a dozen times. I want to watch the new version, but expect it to suck.

Stepping out of the movie for a moment. In life I have often thought about a weird thing. If you get on your bike and go riding as far as you can manage, that is a huge challenge. But then how do you get back home if you pushed as hard as you could? Back to the movie. The group is simply going out and hitting slope after slope, getting further and further from the starting point. And their car. And then tragedy strikes. One person goes down and breaks his leg. In the middle of nowhere.

They find an abandoned ski lodge and shelter there with the intent of someone heading out the next morning to get medical help. Reasonable plan. Except for the psychotic killer roaming about.

But that’s the first one. I got number two to review way back then. And number two literally picks up immediately after the first one ends. I love that! So with number two we get away from the lodge but still have the killer chasing our final girl. And then there was a third! Which much like Cube goes back in time and explores where it all started. Will there be a 4? Unlikely, as it has been almost 15 years since the third came out. And the director, with such a great name, Roar Uthaug, did the Tomb Raider movie since then and the Troll film for Netflix a couple years ago. And Troll 2 is supposed to be filming in 2024!

For a rating, I give the first two a pair of tens. Absolutely worth chasing down and watching. The third installment I can’t recall enough to rate currently, and trying to watch 3 movies a day for this project is a lot already. I mentioned 9 in this editorial, and you can rest assured I didn’t watch all 9 in the lead up to writing this!