To Sleep with Anger
1990 · Charles Burnett
An enigmatic drifter from the South comes to visit an old acquaintance who now lives in South-Central LA.
dir. Charles Burnett · 1990
Charles Burnett emerged from the LA Rebellion — the cohort of Black filmmakers trained at UCLA in the 1970s — with Killer of Sheep, and this third feature is his richest: a family drama that plays like folklore. Danny Glover, who also produced, is Harry Mention, a honey-voiced old acquaintance from the South who appears on the doorstep of a middle-class Black family in South Central Los Angeles and simply stays. Whether he is a charming relic or something older and more corrosive is the film's quiet engine. Burnett braids the Great Migration's unfinished business into the household — Southern superstition against California comfort, blues records against Sunday hymns, a world in which a broom brushed across your feet carries real menace. Distributed poorly in 1990, it won Independent Spirit Awards for Burnett and Glover and found almost no audience; its 2019 restoration confirmed what filmmakers had long said privately — that Burnett is among the great American directors, whatever the ledgers claim.
Lines of influence
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — Burnett's own template: scoring quotidian Black Los Angeles life with a diegetic-feeling stream of blues and gospel needle-drops (Paul Robeson, Dinah Washington) and building narrative through elliptical, near-plotless domestic vignettes rather than causal plot — the exact grammar carried into To Sleep with Anger's household.
- My Brother's Wedding (1983) — Burnett's dry run at the same craft problem — the tragicomedy of South-rooted values colliding with settled California Black-middle-class respectability, staged almost entirely inside a single family home with tonal swerves between folk humor and sudden death.
- Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) — The structural blueprint for Harry: a disruptive, appetite-driven guest who invades a bourgeois household and exposes its hypocrisies from within, the interloper allowed to sprawl through domestic space in deep-focus long takes until the family's order dissolves around him.
- Teorema (1968) — The ambiguous-stranger allegory as method — an unexplained visitor whose mere presence acts as a catalyst that unravels each family member in turn, deliberately withholding whether he is angel or devil so the household's own repressions supply the menace.
- Nothing But a Man (1964) — Location-shot naturalist Black domestic drama built on an understated, non-melodramatic performance register and unforced everyday texture — the neorealist ethic of dignity-in-the-mundane that Burnett applied to a settled family rather than a striving couple.
- Ganja & Hess (1973) — Folkloric Black supernatural embedded in domestic realism and scored to spirituals and gospel — treating myth and the sacred as ambient forces inside the home rather than as horror spectacle, a precedent for To Sleep's superstition-as-menace threaded through hymns.
- Bicycle Thieves (1948) — The Italian-neorealist model Burnett absorbed at UCLA: ethical drama drawn from ordinary economic life, non-actor-inflected performances, and a refusal of plot mechanics in favor of accumulated observation of a family under pressure.
- Bush Mama (1979) — Fellow LA Rebellion work from the same UCLA cohort — community-rooted Black realism using expressionistic sound design and a rejection of Hollywood coverage, sharing Burnett's mandate to render Black interior life outside genre convention.
- Daughters of the Dust (1991) — The closest LA Rebellion sibling: folklore-mode storytelling where ancestral memory and Gullah superstition are dramaturgical forces, sound built from spirituals, and Great-Migration displacement (island-to-North vs. South-to-California) is the underlying wound.
- Sankofa (1993) — LA Rebellion folklore mode taken to its ancestral extreme — the past reaching into the present through ritual and spirit, using the same conviction that African diasporic myth is not metaphor but an operative reality within the frame.
- Eve's Bayou (1997) — Extends the Southern Black-gothic domestic drama where hoodoo, second sight, and folk superstition are woven matter-of-factly into a bourgeois family's daily life, the ambiguous conjure-figure functioning exactly like Harry as a catalyst that surfaces buried family rot.
- Beloved (1998) — Makes literal the ancestral haunting Burnett keeps ambiguous — a folkloric intruder who installs herself in a Black household and detonates its repressed history, scored and staged around spirituals and Migration-era memory.
- Atlantics (2019) — Threads West-African spirit folklore (djinn/possession) through unshowy realist drama of migration and displacement, honoring Burnett's move of letting the supernatural inhabit an ordinary community without genre signposting or explanation.
- His House (2020) — Migration-and-superstition menace lodged inside a single domestic space — a folkloric entity (the apeth) whose presence indexes the family's guilt and displacement, updating Burnett's ambiguous-menace-in-the-home structure into overt horror.
- Us (2019) — Builds a Black family home invaded by an uncanny doppelgänger-intruder whose folkloric menace exposes the household's fault lines, and scores dread with vernacular Black-American musical texture — a genre-forward heir to Harry's trickster-in-the-parlor threat.
- Moonlight (2016) — Jenkins openly inherits Burnett's elliptical, tender realism of Black interior life — narrative built from quiet domestic fragments, expressive musical scoring, and a refusal of melodrama — extending Killer of Sheep/To Sleep's observational grammar to a coming-of-age register.