Spoilers throughout.
I probably would not have found Sleepwalker in the normal run of things. It appeared through one of the horror accounts I follow on Facebook, recommended in the days after the news broke that Hayden Panettiere had died. That inevitably changed the circumstances in which I approached it. What might otherwise have been another modest psychological horror film sitting somewhere in the endless digital catalogue suddenly carried the uncomfortable weight of being one of the last things an actor had left behind.
As it turned out, Sleepwalker became Panettiere’s final completed film. She died on 16 August 2026 at the age of 36, seven months after the film’s release. On 22 September, the Greenville County Coroner’s Office ruled her death accidental following a drug overdose; Greenville police said their wider investigation remained open. That is as far as I want to take the circumstances here. The film is sad enough in retrospect without turning every expression on Panettiere’s face into evidence or premonition.
Still, knowing that this was her last film changes the temperature of the viewing experience. Panettiere plays Sarah Pangborn, a mother already living in the aftermath of catastrophe: her daughter Aimee has died in a car crash, her abusive husband Michael is in a coma, and Sarah’s increasingly violent sleepwalking episodes are making the distinction between waking life, memory and nightmare almost impossible to maintain. The character spends much of the film trying to work out whether something supernatural is pursuing her or whether grief has simply made the ordinary world impossible to trust.
That is a strong premise, and it is the reason I stayed with Sleepwalker even when the film itself was not always doing enough with it. I found it watchable, occasionally effective and ultimately quite sad, but it never frightened me in the way its ingredients suggest it ought to. This is a film with an abusive husband who appears like a ghost, a dead child, a séance, disturbing paintings, sleepwalking, dark rooms, impossible memories and a woman who cannot trust whether she is awake. There is enough material there to make something genuinely unnerving, yet Sleepwalker repeatedly creates the conditions for a proper scare and then seems strangely hesitant about actually delivering one.
What it does have is something more interesting underneath: domestic violence crossing the supernatural threshold. Michael does not have to become a ghost to make Sarah afraid of him because he had already turned the home into an unsafe place while he was alive and conscious. The supernatural elements simply give physical form to a fear that was already living there.
From a Seven-Minute Nightmare to a Feature Film
Sleepwalker was written and directed by Brandon Auman, whose background is largely in animation and television writing, including work on Star Wars Resistance. The film marked his feature directorial debut, but the idea itself had already existed in miniature. Auman first made Sleepwalker as a seven-minute short in 2024, starring Kaitlyn Bausch as Sarah and Lila Karp-Ziring as Aimee. The short establishes essentially the same emotional machinery: a grieving mother, a dead daughter, an abusive husband left comatose by the accident and a series of sleepwalking episodes that blur the border between nightmare and reality.
That short-film origin makes a great deal of sense when watching the feature. There is a clean, compact horror idea buried inside Sleepwalker, the sort of premise that can work very efficiently in ten minutes because the filmmaker only needs to establish the disturbance, twist reality slightly and get out before the audience has time to examine the mechanics too closely. Stretching that premise to roughly 88 or 89 minutes requires a different sort of architecture. Repetition has to become escalation, secondary characters need lives beyond serving the central mystery, and the uncertainty between dreaming and waking has to keep developing rather than simply repeating itself.
The feature was produced by Verdi Productions and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way, with Brainstorm Media acquiring North American distribution. It received a day-and-date theatrical and digital release on 9 January 2026. Panettiere was not simply the lead performer either; she also served as an executive producer, which gives the project a little more significance within the final period of her career.
Much of the film was made in Rhode Island, where Verdi Productions has developed a regular production base. East Greenwich was among the locations used, including the town boat launch and Academy Field, and the Rhode Island premiere was later held at the Greenwich Odeum. That regional production background gives the film a slightly different texture from the generic suburban geography that turns up in so much low- to mid-budget streaming horror.
Panettiere later described the shoot as a breakneck fifteen-day production and said the material demanded a sustained emotional intensity. She also spoke openly about being drawn to characters shaped by trauma and about having personal experience she could draw upon when dealing with guilt and loss. I would rather leave those comments where she placed them than turn the film into a coded autobiography, but they do help explain why Sarah feels more lived-in than some of the material surrounding her.
Sarah and the Unreliable Business of Waking Up
The opening establishes the film’s best visual rule. Sarah is comforting Aimee after a nightmare and explains that she can test whether she is dreaming by counting the fingers on her hand. It is the sort of simple piece of dream logic that horror films benefit from because it gives the audience something concrete to watch for. Once the count becomes impossible and reality slips, we understand that Sarah’s perception cannot be trusted, but we also understand that she has developed a method for questioning it.
The problem is that Sarah wakes into something worse than the nightmare. Aimee is already dead, and what seemed for a moment like an ordinary scene between mother and daughter turns out to be another piece of Sarah’s fractured memory. The transition is effective because the film does not initially announce itself as a dream. It lets warmth and familiarity settle before reminding us that the person Sarah is talking to no longer exists.
Panettiere is strongest when Sarah is allowed to remain relatively restrained. She does not play the character as permanently hysterical, which would have become exhausting very quickly. Instead, Sarah often looks like someone whose emotional resources have simply been depleted. She is grieving Aimee, trying to remain present for her surviving son Holden, dealing with Gloria’s concern, negotiating the lingering presence of Michael and attempting to work out whether the impossible things she sees are manifestations of trauma or something genuinely supernatural.
Sarah is also an artist, and her paintings become one of the film’s more interesting pieces of production design. The recurring figures, distorted bodies and multiple eyes turn private disturbance into physical objects. She may not be able to explain what is happening to her, but she can put it on canvas. There is a nice idea here about artistic work becoming evidence of an unconscious life, particularly when Sarah herself cannot remember or fully account for what she has created.
Visually, the eyes are hardly subtle, but I do not think subtlety is always necessary in horror. A disturbing human form covered in eyes can simply be a disturbing human form covered in eyes, especially when the entire story is about a woman who no longer knows whether she is seeing too much or not seeing clearly enough. The paintings give the film a visual vocabulary of its own, even if Auman does not push that vocabulary quite as far as he might have.
Michael and the Monster Who Was Already There
Justin Chatwin plays Michael Anders, Sarah’s estranged husband, and the film gradually makes it clear that Sarah’s fear of him existed long before anything supernatural entered the picture. Michael was controlling and abusive, and the memories that surface throughout the film show a household in which ordinary domestic situations could become accusations, threats or demonstrations of power.
This is where Sleepwalker becomes more interesting to me than its basic ghost-story machinery. Michael’s body is lying unconscious in a hospital, yet Sarah keeps seeing him inside the house. The obvious horror question is whether his spirit is somehow reaching her despite his coma, but the more unsettling interpretation is that he never really left the house psychologically. His physical absence does not remove the habits of fear that developed while he was present.
Domestic violence therefore becomes the bridge between the psychological and supernatural versions of the story. Sarah does not need evidence that ghosts exist in order to be afraid when Michael appears behind her. The fear is already legitimate. Horror merely gives it a shape that can move through corridors.
Chatwin is effective when Michael is allowed to remain plausible, although I think the character occasionally becomes too overtly villainous in the flashbacks. The material would arguably have been more disturbing if Michael’s abuse remained quieter and more socially presentable, because that is often what makes this sort of behaviour so insidious. A man who looks like a monster to everybody is relatively easy for a story to identify; a man who can appear reasonable to outsiders while making one person’s private life unbearable is much more difficult.
There are moments when Sleepwalker seems to understand that distinction, particularly when Michael turns seemingly ordinary situations into reasons for Sarah to feel guilty or irresponsible. Those moments matter because they establish how he has trained her to distrust her own judgement. Once that foundation exists, the supernatural material no longer needs to invent Sarah’s instability from scratch. It only needs to exploit it.
Gloria, Holden, Aimee and the People Caught in Sarah’s Orbit
Beverly D’Angelo plays Sarah’s mother Gloria, and she gives the film some much-needed warmth. Gloria is eccentric, spiritual and considerably more willing than Sarah to consider explanations outside ordinary rationality. She could very easily have become the familiar horror-film relative who exists largely to introduce the séance and say unsettling things about spirits, but D’Angelo gives her enough personality to make her feel like someone who had a life before the film started.
Panettiere and D’Angelo also have an easy mother-daughter chemistry. Panettiere said during promotion that the two had known one another years earlier and that they became close during the production, and that familiarity helps their scenes avoid feeling entirely functional. Gloria can irritate Sarah and comfort her within the same conversation, which is generally how families work when nobody has been written specifically to deliver exposition.
Holden, played by Laird LaCoste, is Sarah’s surviving son and occupies a much quieter position in the story. He is grieving too, but he spends a good deal of the film withdrawn into his tablet and his own world while the adults around him gradually lose control of theirs. I actually prefer that to the standard horror-film child who exists mainly to stare into corners and announce cryptic information. Holden feels more like a child trying to remain somewhere safe while the family structure around him becomes increasingly unreliable.
Corinne Sweeney’s Aimee has the more obviously supernatural function. Because she appears through dreams, memories and visions, the film can shift her between the ordinary child Sarah remembers and something much more disturbing. The uncertainty surrounding her is important because Aimee is simultaneously the person Sarah most wants to see and the person whose appearance most clearly indicates that something is wrong.
Mischa Barton, meanwhile, plays Joelle Anders, Michael’s sister. Joelle complicates the situation around the comatose Michael because she sees him through familial loyalty rather than through Sarah’s experience of abuse. The film could probably have developed that tension further, but even in its relatively limited form it adds another uncomfortable layer. Abusive people rarely exist in isolation; they belong to families and social circles containing people who may have experienced a very different version of them.
Lori Tan Chinn’s Bai Zhao helps move the story more decisively into supernatural territory. Once the film turns towards ritual and the séance, it begins openly entertaining the possibility that Sarah is dealing with something more than a traumatised mind. The cast also includes Kea Ho as Nurse Alexis and Eric Lutes as Doctor Henson, although the emotional structure of the film remains concentrated around Sarah, Michael, Gloria, Holden and Aimee.
The House, the Paintings and a Film That Looks Colder Than It Feels
Cinematographer Marcus Friedlander gives Sleepwalker a subdued visual palette, while production designer Sean Hoschek and art director AJ Cardoza build domestic spaces that gradually become less trustworthy. Sebastian Evans provides the original score, and Tucker Marolf edited the film. These are not merely names sitting in the credits because the film’s effectiveness depends heavily on making an ordinary home feel unstable without transforming it into an extravagant gothic mansion.
The Rhode Island locations help. There is a wintry, slightly emptied-out quality to parts of the film, with bare trees, subdued light and interiors that often seem too large for the number of people occupying them. Sarah’s world feels cold before anything supernatural happens, and the blue-toned night material pushes that feeling further.
The house itself could have been used more aggressively as a horror space. Staircases, bedrooms, doorways and darkened corridors are all present, but the film does not develop the geography into the kind of visual trap that the best haunted-house films manage. In The Conjuring, for instance, a room begins to carry memory simply because we know where the wardrobe is, where the door is and where something may be waiting. Sleepwalker has spaces that could develop that same accumulated dread, but it often moves through them too quickly.
Evans’ score works in much the same way as the visual design: it supports unease without dominating the film. There was no particular musical moment that stayed with me afterwards, but that is not necessarily a failure in this sort of thriller. The problem is more that the film as a whole often remains in a state of low-level unease when it needs sharper changes of pressure.
Where the Film Keeps Almost Scaring Me
This is where my main reservation settles in. Sleepwalker repeatedly constructs situations that ought to be frightening, but very few of them develop into sequences I would call genuinely scary.
The séance is the clearest example. We have a grieving woman whose perception is already unreliable, a family carrying unresolved trauma, candlelight, darkness, the possibility of communication with the dead and an abusive husband who seems capable of entering Sarah’s world despite lying elsewhere in a coma. Horror films have managed to build entire franchises from less promising equipment.
Yet the sequence never really tightens the screws. The film gives us atmosphere and disturbing imagery, but it does not create that unpleasant sensation of wanting to look somewhere on the screen while simultaneously hoping nothing is there. There is a difference between knowing a scene belongs to horror and actually feeling threatened by it.
That is why I kept thinking about Insidious and The Conjuring, not because Sleepwalker needed their budgets or mythology, but because those films understand visual anticipation. They direct the viewer’s eye, create negative space and make us worry about the parts of the frame that appear empty. A doorway stops being architecture and becomes a promise. A chair in the corner becomes suspicious simply because the camera has allowed us to notice it.
Sleepwalker could have done much more with its sleepwalking premise alone. Waking in another part of the house without knowing how you arrived there is frightening. Discovering a door has been unlocked, an object moved or a conversation apparently held while you were unconscious is frightening. Even watching footage of yourself doing something you cannot remember doing would have allowed the film to turn Sarah’s own body into an unreliable presence.
Instead, the film often falls back on visions of Michael, abrupt awakenings and the continuing question of whether what Sarah saw was real. That uncertainty works for a while, but eventually the pattern becomes familiar. Ambiguity stops being unsettling when you can predict when the film is going to deploy it.
The Finger-Counting Rule and the Horror of Unreliable Reality
The finger-counting motif remains one of the film’s strongest ideas because it gives the dream world a rule. Horror thrives on rules, even when they are irrational. We understand seven days in The Ring, the approaching figure in It Follows and the geography of the Further in Insidious because each creates a framework within which fear can operate.
Once Sleepwalker establishes that malformed or impossible hands can expose a dream, the audience begins looking for them. That creates participation. We are no longer simply waiting for Sarah to tell us whether she is awake; we are inspecting the image ourselves.
I would have liked Auman to push that idea further through the whole visual language of the film. Clocks could show contradictory times, rooms could change slightly between cuts, reflections could fail to behave correctly, family photographs could contain details that were not there previously. Even small continuity disruptions could become deliberate signals that Sarah’s reality was collapsing.
The film occasionally approaches that sort of dream logic, but it never fully commits to making the viewer as uncertain as Sarah. We understand that she does not trust reality, but we are usually still watching from a relatively safe distance. The best psychological horror tends to remove some of that safety.
The Truth About Aimee’s Death
The eventual revelation surrounding the crash is what gives the film’s guilt its real shape. Michael had been abusive, and Sarah had reached the point where she feared what he might do. In an attempt to control the situation, she secretly put sleeping medication into his food.
Michael then left with Aimee, and as he drove, the medication began affecting him. The car crashed, killing Aimee and leaving Michael in a coma. Sarah had not intended any of this to happen, and certainly had not intended to harm her daughter, but her attempt to protect herself and the children becomes part of the chain of events that destroys the family.
That makes Sarah’s guilt more complicated than simple survivor’s remorse. She is a victim of Michael’s abuse, but she is also carrying knowledge of an action whose consequences cannot be undone. The film does not need to argue that Sarah is morally equivalent to Michael, because she is not. What it does instead is place her inside the miserable ambiguity of unintended consequence.
Michael created a household in which Sarah felt she had to take desperate action. Sarah’s desperate action contributed to circumstances she could never have predicted. Aimee pays for the result, while Holden survives largely because he did not go with them.
That is the real haunting in Sleepwalker. Ghosts may or may not exist, but consequence certainly does.
Gloria’s Death and Trauma Turning Against the Wrong Person
The film’s cruellest sequence arrives when Sarah believes she is being attacked by Michael. She fights back against the man she thinks she sees, only for reality to reveal that the person in front of her is Gloria. Sarah pushes her mother away, Gloria falls down the stairs and dies.
What makes the scene effective is that Sarah is doing exactly what years of fear have taught her to do: defend herself against Michael. The tragedy is that Michael is not physically there. Whether the vision is supernatural or psychological, his presence has become powerful enough to redirect Sarah’s fear towards somebody who was actually trying to help her.
This is where the film’s domestic-violence theme crosses most effectively into horror. Michael continues damaging the family without needing to be conscious. The habits of fear he created have become independent of him, almost like a haunting that no longer requires its ghost.
The supernatural explanation remains open, of course. Michael may genuinely be reaching into Sarah’s world, and the film deliberately refuses to close that door. What matters more to me is that the psychological interpretation is frightening enough on its own.
The Ending and a Nightmare That May Have Lasted Only Minutes
After Gloria’s death, Sarah gets into her car and drives. Exhausted and increasingly detached from reality, she begins drifting towards sleep behind the wheel, and one of the film’s recurring nightmare images finally becomes literal. A tree branch crashes through the windscreen and pierces her chest, killing her.
It is a grim ending even before the film complicates it. The same sort of imagery had already become associated with Aimee, so Sarah’s death feels like the nightmare completing a circle. She has spent the film trying to understand the event that killed her daughter, only to arrive at a grotesque variation of the same image herself.
Then Sleepwalker returns to the night Aimee died. Holden tells Sarah that Michael has taken Aimee, and Sarah races after them. The film suddenly opens the possibility that the chronology we have accepted may never have been real in the first place. Perhaps Sarah died that same night. Perhaps everything involving Michael’s coma, Gloria, the séance, the visions and Sarah’s later death existed inside a final extended dream, a mind compressing guilt, fear and memory into what feels like months or years while only moments are actually passing. The film does not confirm that interpretation, but it clearly invites it.
I can understand why the ending will frustrate people. The danger with this sort of reveal is that it can make viewers feel as though the film is withdrawing the reality of everything they have invested in. Once a story says that most of what we watched may have been a dream, it risks turning ambiguity into an escape clause.
I did not completely dislike it, though. Emotionally, the ending works better for me than it does logically because it reduces Sarah’s entire experience to one terrible idea: she has never really escaped the night her daughter died. Whether that means she literally died that night or has simply been psychologically trapped there ever since becomes almost secondary.
That is why I found the ending tragically sad rather than particularly clever. Sarah spends the entire film attempting to wake from the worst moment of her life, and the final scene suggests that she may never have had anywhere else to wake up to.
Familiar Faces and an Accidental Layer of Nostalgia
There is also a strange little current of pop-cultural nostalgia running through the cast, particularly for anyone whose viewing memory extends across the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Beverly D’Angelo brings National Lampoon’s Vacation history with her, Mischa Barton immediately carries memories of The O.C. and, for horror viewers, The Sixth Sense, while Justin Chatwin still evokes War of the Worlds and later Shameless.
Panettiere herself belongs to several different eras of popular culture. There is Remember the Titans, Claire Bennet in Heroes, Juliette Barnes in Nashville and Kirby Reed in the Scream films. Her career crossed the period when broadcast television could still turn a young actor into a weekly cultural presence and the later streaming era in which films like Sleepwalker appear almost quietly, waiting to be discovered through recommendations and algorithms.
That is partly why it feels strangely appropriate that I found this one through Facebook rather than through a cinema trailer or magazine review. A horror account put it in front of me because of Panettiere’s death, and suddenly a film that had passed beneath my radar became connected to a much larger archive of things I had watched over the years.
The film even features Carnival of Souls from 1962, a particularly apt piece of horror history to have flickering somewhere inside a story about a woman caught between ordinary life, death and uncertain consciousness. Whether intended as a major statement or simply used as atmospheric material, the connection suits Sleepwalker almost too well.
Hayden Panettiere’s Last Performance
Watching Panettiere now is inevitably different from watching her in January 2026, when Sleepwalker was simply her latest film and she was talking publicly about wanting to continue producing and perhaps direct in the future. During promotion she spoke enthusiastically about working behind the camera as an executive producer and about wanting to expand that side of her career. Knowing that those possibilities were cut short gives the film a sadness that has nothing to do with Sarah’s nightmares.
I do not want to use her death as a way of upgrading the film. Sleepwalker is still uneven, and its weaknesses remain visible. It still needed stronger scares, more confident escalation and a more adventurous use of its dream logic.
Panettiere herself is not the problem. She has to carry almost every emotional register the film possesses: grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, maternal protectiveness, guilt and the disorientation of not knowing whether she can trust her own senses. She keeps Sarah human even when the screenplay begins piling one layer of unreality onto another.
There is also something poignant about the fact that Panettiere had a genuine creative stake in the production. This was not simply another acting job taken between larger projects. She executive produced the film and spoke about wanting to do more from behind the camera, which makes Sleepwalker feel less like a footnote than it might otherwise have done.
A Watchable Horror Film That Needed to Push Harder
My main feeling about Sleepwalker has not really changed since watching it. It is a watchable psychological horror thriller with a good central idea and a lead performance stronger than some of the material surrounding it.
The domestic-abuse angle gives the supernatural story genuine weight. The idea that Michael can continue occupying Sarah’s home and mind even while comatose is more disturbing than a generic ghost would have been. The finger-counting device works, the paintings provide memorable visual texture, the Rhode Island locations give the film some physical character, and Beverly D’Angelo adds warmth to a story that could otherwise have become oppressively grim.
What it lacks is the nerve to push those elements far enough. The house never becomes frightening enough, the séance never reaches the intensity it promises, the dream logic remains relatively conventional, and Michael’s appearances gradually become familiar rather than more disturbing. A film about sleepwalking should be able to make the viewer afraid of losing time, losing control of the body and waking somewhere impossible. Sleepwalker gestures towards those fears without fully exploiting them.
That is why I would stop well short of calling it another Insidious or The Conjuring. Those films understand that supernatural horror needs rhythm: pressure, release, silence, escalation and then something that changes the meaning of the room you are sitting in. Sleepwalker often has the room but not the final turn of the screw.
Yet I cannot dismiss it either. There is something underneath the modest thriller exterior that stayed with me longer than most of the actual scares. Sarah is living inside the after-effects of domestic violence, grief and a decision she can never undo, and the film turns that damage into a landscape where ghosts and memories become almost interchangeable.
By the end, I was not especially frightened for Sarah. I was sad for her.
That sadness has acquired another dimension now because Sleepwalker became Hayden Panettiere’s final film, something nobody watching it when it first appeared in January could have known. I do not think the right response is to search the performance for premonitions or transform the character into the actor. It is enough to see somebody doing her work, carrying a difficult film, talking at the time about the things she hoped to do next and leaving behind one more performance.
The horror in Sleepwalker is built around the fear that a person can keep moving without ever really waking from the thing that hurt them. The film does not always know how to make that frightening, but in its final moments it does manage to make it terribly sad, and that feeling lingers after most of the shadows have disappeared.
R.I.P. Hayden Panettiere.
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