AllMovie

A crisis amongst the members of a highly dysfunctional British family sets the stage for the thriller-chiller miniseries The Sleeper. Violet (Eileen Atkins), the control-freak matriarch of the Moon family, was sorely aggrieved that her son and daughter-in-law intended to sell the family farmhouse. Thus, during a particularly bleak Christmas holiday, Violet gathered together her relatives at the farm in hopes of maintaining her supremacy over the Moons. Not long after the family had converged upon the farm, there was a power outage, a series of bizarre events involving a mysterious figure from Violet's past, and, inevitably, a murder. It all had to do with a horrible family secret and a band of ragtag spiritualists, but this did not become clear until the end of the story -- and even then it was a tad on the perplexing side. Adapted from a novel by Gillian White, The Sleeper was broadcast by BBC1 in two hour-long episodes on December 26 and 27, 2000.