I CAN’T SLEEP (1994)

Claire Denis turns a tru-life Paris set serial killer story into something out of a Patricia Highsmith split level narrative, filled with loathsome characters around every corner. Normally, either the underachieving black nightclub drag chanteuse who has been murdering little old ladies with his masochistic white lover or the cops on the case would run the film structure. But Denis gives equal emphasis to a group of subsidiary characters & stories that a more conventional thriller would have left as tangential sub-plots. So the film doesn’t put out the sort of pulsating charge you may expect from the creepy subject, but it has its own different dramatic pull.