In the first exclusive clip from the new film “State Like Sleep,” Katherine Waterston, who plays Katherine Grand, nervously and awkwardly seduces Michael Shannon in a hotel room.
“State Like Sleep” is the first narrative feature film from documentary filmmaker Meredith Danluck.
The film follows Waterston’s character who, one year after the sudden death of her celebrity husband, receives a phone call that pulls her back to Brussels and the life there that she’s tried to forget. Once back, she discovers a web of secrets that compel her to unravel the mysteries surrounding Stefan’s (Michiel Huisman) last days alive.
Her investigation leads her to the high-class underground club scene where she discovers a mysterious woman and a strange group of friends, but she also meets a new man (Shannon), a fellow American.
“State Like Sleep,” which had its premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, will be released by The Orchard on digital and on demand on Jan. 1, 2019 and in theaters on Jan. 4, 2019.
“This process of grieving is not unusual or unique, Joan Didion speaks of this very same thing in her book ‘The Year of Magical Thinking.’ She talks about this feeling that if one properly explains it and find a target of blame, a death feels like it can be magically reversed,” director Meredith Danluck said in a statement. “The film explores this impulse we have to reorder the narrative of what we’ve experienced when the experience is inexplicable. The most inexplicable mystery in life is death so I appropriated the mystery genre to serve the deeper narrative of grief.”
Waterston most recently appeared in Jonah Hill’s directorial debut “Mid90s” and Warner Bros.’ wizarding world sequel “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. She’ll next be in “Amundson,” about the Arctic explorer and the Sci-fi flick Fluidic.
Shannon, who starred in “Fahrenheit 451,” as well as 2017’s “The Shape of Water,” will next be in Rian Johnson’s crime mystery “Knives Out” alongside a star-studded cast featuring Chris Evans, Daniel Craig and Jamie Lee Curtis.
“State Like Sleep” also stars Michiel Huisman (“Game of Thrones,” “Haunting of Hill House”) and Luke Evans (“Beauty and the Beast”).
“State Like Sleep is a movie. It’s fiction. However, like any writer, I have drawn from personal experiences, some more than others,” Danluck said of the film. “It’s true I lived in Belgium with someone who masterfully hid a secret life. It’s also true that my mom was suddenly hospitalized in Brussels while on a chocolate tour with her friends, forcing me to return years after abandoning my life there. And though the details in the movie are fictionalized, someone very close to me took their own life and I, in many ways held myself responsible.
“The feelings of complicity and guilt were overwhelming and completely illogical. Looking outside myself for answers and explanations meant I could create a story about what happened, one that excluded me,” Danluck continued. “I needed to tell myself a story to make sense of what had happened which is what Katherine does in State Like Sleep.”