‘Sleep’ could’ve been better than average
LOS ANGELES – Again teamed with Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman stars as an amnesia victim whose brain resets back to 13 years ago after each night’s slumber in the psychological thriller “Before I Go to Sleep.”
Writer-director Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestseller honors the lurid spirit of the page-turner enough to satisfy fans, but he doesn’t transmute the material into something richer and deeper as, say, Hitchcock would.
The film opens with an extreme close-up on the bloodshot eye of Christine Lucas (Kidman), a woman who wakes up every morning and doesn’t recognize her own bedroom or the man in bed next to her (Firth). She is suffering from atypical psychogenic amnesia, which means ever since she endured severe head trauma 13 years ago, she can’t retain a day’s events in her mind until she goes to sleep, but after a night, the slate’s wiped clean again.
With a weary patience, the man in bed reveals that he is Christine’s husband, Ben, and that she had an accident which caused her amnesia. When Ben goes off to work, the phone rings and a man calling himself Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong) explains to Christine that he’s a neuropsychologist who’s been helping with her memory disorder. He instructs her on where to find a camera in her closet on which she’s recorded a video diary over the last two weeks, prompting an extended flashback to illustrate what she’s learned so far.
It turns out there’s quite a lot that Ben hasn’t been telling Christine. For a start, it wasn’t an accident that caused her amnesia, but a brutal violent attack from an unknown assailant.
Christine catches up on what she’s learned from the diary each day, and starts to realize Ben is not the gentle, doting husband he seems to be.
One of the film’s virtues is how it plays with casting, exploiting expectations audiences have around actors like Strong and Firth. It works especially well with Firth, who in the semiotics of British cinema especially, is the very apogee of cuddly male rectitude and moral probity. Here, however, he shows off a dark side.
This is exactly the kind of trashy read of a book that in the hands of the right director could have been elevated into something really special with its peculiarly female take on paranoia.