Pathological memory, ritualized madness, and the traumatized woman ties Mona Fastvold’s “The Sleepwalker” to Kent’s tale about the unraveling of a single mother. “The Babadook’s” still-grieving widow, Essie Davis’ Amelia, mourns the loss of her husband, her career and her dreams for her family—now plagued with exasperation and resentment surrounding her troubled child, Noah Wiseman’s Samuel. Amelia sinks into an insomniac haze while Samuel howls with emotional pain. He is the manifestation of her loss and the only voice she has left—until the incantation uttered during a bedtime storybook ritual invokes the monster within.

The physicality of pain and suffering, which replaces the traditional genre cinema depiction of the (naked) female body, also appears in “The Sleepwalker.” We glimpse the nude frames of adult siblings Kaia (Gitte Witt) and Christine (Stephanie Ellis) within the first few minutes of the movie, but their wan bodies—draped in the nightgowns of little girls—are vessels of childhood trauma. Kaia is waifish, frail. She, at turns, feels great shame about her physical afflictions, but also traipses across the forest grounds of her secluded family estate dressed in the sheer tatters of a fairy tale nymph. Christine wanders the hallways, unconcerned with her nudity like a child. She is hypersexual, impulsive. She returns to the family home to reopen the wounds of the past, while Kaia continues to bury them. “She has a hard time separating her fictions from reality,” Kaia says. And so Christine is the one who sleepwalks—restless, caught in the uneasy shift between truth and an “unconscious” coping mechanism that may or may not be real. These female bodies—Amelia’s, Kaia’s, Christine’s—express fear. They are isolated bodies—costumed specters that float above the bed in a lucid dream and escape into the woods like feral children.

In a genre that is a study in extremes, women often have little agency. Complicated, multifaceted and flawed female characters are still few. Ana Lily Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”—an Iranian vampire film with the posturing of a spaghetti western as told by ‘80s-era Jim Jarmusch and ‘90s-era Gregg Araki—opens with a lament from a sleazy television lawyer about women slaving away for their husbands only to be replaced by a “younger model.” The pressures of female perfection and obedience pervades the film—from the omnipresent chador worn by traditional Iranian women, to the phantom of a family matriarch whose departure is blamed for a grieving father’s devastating drug addiction and depression. A local thug runs roughshod over “Bad City’s” residents, threatening a woman he pimps out where it hurts her most: he can make certain she will never become a mother if she doesn’t stay in line. Although the dial-a-lawyer warns of mayhem to women across the airwaves, Sheila Vand’s fanged and cloaked titular “Girl” is the cruel city’s lone woman who violently defies her role. She has romantic impulses that simmer to the surface, remnants of her humanity, now gone. But her otherness makes it easy to taunt the men who roam the streets at night begging for a freebie from the neighborhood sex workers and to terrorize a young boy beggar who isn’t so poor that he owns a skateboard. “I’ll be watching you for the rest of your life,” she hisses to him in reprimand. It is a twisted role reversal that subjugates the men much as they do to women from the day they are born, and later, bred for submission.