Stumbling home from a bar one night, drunken movie projectionist Rene (Matthes) impulsively steals a sports car belonging to ski instructor Marco (Heino Ferch) and swerves into a snowy embankment to avoid missing Theo (Josef Bierbichler), a farmer whose daughter is stowed away in his horse cab. When the trailer flips, Rene flees the scene, the girl is left in a coma, and the cops maintain a puzzling belief, that there was no other vehicle. Thus begins an intriguing series of serendipitous encounters...

Made before his kinetic, visually audacious art-house hit "Run, Lola, Run," Tykwer's melodrama of mystery, lapsed memory, and fateful coincidence is a slower affair, for sure (what isn't?), but no less enthralling for its more lugubrious pace. Not unlike Kieslowski, Tykwer has threaded together the stories of several disparate characters, gradually connecting their lonely lives in clever and not incredulous ways. "Sleepers" is a film about intimacy, and the difficulty of achieving it, even when circumstances force people into each other's inner orbit.