We Put the World to Sleep had its world première at Nightmares Film Festival, 18th Oct 2025
[This is a long and detailed review, and contains spoilers. If you are sensitive to this, do not read beyond the first still]
Conventionally, feature debuts get called ‘calling cards’ when they are good, or at least show the filmmaker’s potential and promise, however constrained these may have been by the inevitable budgetary limitations of first-time filmmaking. All this was certainly true of Adrian Țofei’s debut Be My Cat: A Film For Anne (2015), but it also was – or pretended to be – a literal calling card to its addressee, the actress Anne Hathaway, for whom Țofei, or at least the character played by him who was also called Adrian and was also making a no-budget film called Be My Cat, harboured an unsavoury, indeed murderous, infatuation. There was no way that this funny/creepy found-footage fiction would attract the attention, let alone the affection, of the real Hathaway – but what Țofei was doing was cleverly dramatising the distance between his own modest filmmaking and big-budget Hollywood fare. For Țofei kept showing his viewer the vast gulf between his immense ambitions and his actual opportunities, ensuring that Hollywood celebrity was no less out of his league than Hathaway herself. Of course it did not help that Adrian – i.e. the debuting filmmaker character – was also a serial killer, luring would-be actresses with the mere presence of his camera, and then killing them in cold blood (and of course filming their deaths, like a stalker cum snuffmaker).
Yet Be My Cat was a piece of metacinema, concerned less with the mechanics of murder (the focus of so much other horror) than with its mediation – and the reality effect created by the immediacy of found footage’s intradiegetic camerawork was only enhanced by the director’s uneasy conflation of his real self and his fictional on-screen persona. Of course Țofei did not slaughter his own cast – but the film still gets us worrying about this by constantly playing upon its own realist mode and our suspension of disbelief – which is where its horror lay. All of which is to suggest that Be My Cat is a hard act to follow – and with its sort-of sequel We Put the World to Sleep, Țofei not only continues to concentrate on questions about his film’s constructed reality, but also repeatedly expresses an anxiety about what he is doing, where he is going, and what sort of film is taking shape along the way. As we see the very processes of this film’s making, with plots being enacted only to be discarded, and with characters, in Pirandello-esque fashion, wondering aloud if they are mere characters in a movie, even the title seems to be expressing a fear on Țofei’s part as to the soporific effect that all this postmodern meandering might be having on the viewer.
We Put the World to Sleep, presents itself as screenlife (although it is easy to forget this once you, along with the characters, become lost in its convolutions). An unseen character searches on Letterboxd for “best documentary films”, but in fact finds a list of mockumentaries, and clicks on the newest entry We Put the World to Sleep, whose plot summary (accurate, if partial) reads, “Adrian and Duru get lost in the characters they play in an apocalyptic film and embark of a secret mission to end the world for real.” Then the film(-within-a-film) is watched online. In it, Duru is played by Duru Yücel, whom Țofei met and married after making his first film, and who here is his co-writer and co-star. Their characters Adrian and Duru – also husband and wife – start prepping We Put the World to Sleep as a relatively conventional film, but then decide that, much as Adrian in Be My Cat used filmmaking as a cover for killing, they should use this film as cover for their very real intentions to expedite the end of the world and all living things on it, i.e. to put the world to sleep.
While Adrian and Duru ground their motivations in cod philosophy and utilitarian sophistry, really they are doing something like what Adrian did in the first film: justifying murder, only this time on a massive scale. They do not, however, have the financing to realise their ambitions, whether on screen or in reality. Instead, they disappear down a rabbit hole of paranoia and conspiracy, they begin to feel as though they are puppets (or indeed robots) in a fictive scenario beyond their control, and they wonder who is posting the IMDb entries on their production. Eventually, as Adrian gets sidetracked by an alternative plan to save the world through a technological singularity, the couple parts ways over the best method for executing their intentions without losing their sanity, and the film collapses.
[if you are spoiler sensitive, stop reading now]
That however, is only part of it, for We Put the World to Sleep is a film of two halves, or indeed of two films. In the second section (called Source of Evil), Adrian reverts to type, preparing for his next rôle by putting himself not just into the mindset, but into the ridiculously gross blood-soaked underwear, of real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez (aka the Night Stalker), much to the disgust and horror of Duru who thinks her husband is crossing too many moral lines, and worries that he may be becoming an actual psychopath. Both of the scenarios – ending the world, finding one’s inner maniac – involve the characters playing with notions of mass murder and losing themselves in their rôles, and both end with the couple coming apart. Meanwhile their two abortive attempts to make a film are the film.
If Adrian and Duru keep struggling – ultimately in vain – to realise their vision of destroying the world (or at least their relationship), if they keep confusing reality and delusion, and if they feel at times that they are merely characters in a movie, then their frustration and madness are the very stuff of We Put the World to Sleep. For this is a poioumenon, an artefact concerned with its own making (and its own artifice) – and while arguably all found footage films are poioumena in the sense that they include their own production in their plotting, this foregrounds its meta status more than most.
Meanwhile Adrian not only refers to himself as the filmmaker behind Be My Cat, but revisits that film’s locations, and even lets Țofei’s mother Dorina reprise her rôle as Adrian’s mother (while causing Adrian to question the reality of his mother’s identity). Later, when Adrian undergoes a process not unlike the Roman ritual of incubation, living and sleeping in a room wallpapered with images of the Night Stalker in the hope of drawing on his spirit for a ‘new’ rôle, it is as though he is preparing once more to make – or remake, or sequelise – his first film, and trying to find something of himself in a generic movie-style (yet real) madman. Shot over nine years and cut down from 150 hours of largely improvised footage which Țofei and Yücel lived as well as filming, We Put the World to Sleep is a concentrated study not just in the disorienting interplay between truth and fiction (which is expressly paralleled to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence) inherent to found footage, but also in the format’s limits.
If you watch this expecting presentations of global devastation or murder, you may leave disappointed – but that disappointment and vexation, encoded deeply in the film’s layered structure, is the point, as we are shown where the film’s fantasies end, and brought to a state of something akin to Platonic aporia. After all, Țofei and the pink-fonted textual commentary with which he regularly punctuates his dual narratives repeatedly remind us that this (whatever else ‘this’ may be) is also only a movie, a construct and a fiction, while raising the uneasy possibility that perhaps reality is a little like that too – just shadows on the cave wall. We Put the World to Sleep is not only split in two, but is concerned with other dualisms (truth and illusion, character and actor, film and life) – the very poles around which found footage operates. As Adrian and Duru negotiate the kind of film they want to make and rehearse scenes without ever getting anywhere, what they do in fact make is this strange, reflexive behind-the-scenes work that is always trying (and failing) to break out of its own limitations.
Ultimately this is the F for Fake (1973) of found footage: a fascinating folly that deconstructs itself, that forestalls any criticism of its shortcomings by explicitly including all such critique in its unfolding dialectic, and that keeps asking us both what a film is, and more importantly, what we expect from one. A third film in Țofei’s informal trilogy, Pure, is apparently coming soon, and will focus on Yücel, or at least on Duru – and while it is genuinely unclear what direction it can or will take, it is hard not to be keen to see where it goes.
strap: F for Found Footage: Adrian Țofei’s sort-of sequel is a metafictive poioumenon that disappears (twice!) down its own rabbit-hole, and contains its own self-critique.
© Anton Bitel
