Sometimes, you watch a horror film that seems impossible to review. Adrian Tofei’s We Put the World to Sleep, playing this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival, makes a strong demonstration that indie filmmakers create works far superior to tentpole theatrical releases. One phrase perfectly captures the spirit of Tofei’s latest: bloody brilliant. While Be My Cat: A Film for Anne takes viewers into the mind of a serial killer, We Put the World to Sleep hypnotizes you into an apocalyptic world, with plenty of mind trickery and psychological magic. Tofei tinkers around with perception and reality in ways that are smartly constructed and cleverly delivered.
Tofei and co-writer/co-star Duru Yücel play fictionalized versions of themselves, Adrian and Duru, who are hellbent on causing the end of the world. They are struck with the idea while shooting a film, in which they are hellbent on causing the end of the world. Did I already write that? We Put the World to Sleep feels surreal and cut from David Lynch’s filmmaking cloth, circa Mulholland Drive. Tofei plunges the viewer into a sticky underworld where truth is meaningless, and living simply means playing a role in someone else’s story. If that doesn’t make much sense, welcome to Adrian Tofei’s explosively bewildering universe.
As the second installment in Tofei’s spiritual trilogy, We Put the World to Sleep tailspins into a chaotic, confusing, and cosmic wasteland that just can not be described any other way. Once the outer layers begin peeling away, existential themes about the meaning of life, our relationship to others, and what we can learn about and from The Night Stalker emerge through a frightening nervous breakdown—the one you’re about to have, that is. Overwhelming dread soon sets in and only escalates until the very last frame.
Tofei and Yücel build We Put the World to Sleep in such a way that cracking the soil any further threatens to spoil the story. What you think you know about the narrative and Tofei’s work should be discarded heading into this inventive found footage experience. When you anticipate one thing, the filmmaker goes in the opposite direction, or not even opposite, he pokes through an alternate dimension altogether. Treat it as though you’re experiencing the creative process right along with Tofei and Yücel, from inception and early drafts to every messy idea that pops into their heads. You’ll thank me later.
We Put the World Together screens at the Unnamed Footage Festival on March 27, 2026, at 3:55 pm in the Balboa Theater in San Francisco.
