Sleep Review: A Thriller About Losing Control
Streaming Movie Review - Thriller
About one to three percent of adults sleepwalk, making it rare enough to seem a bit frightening. In his first feature film, Sleep, available now on VOD, Jason Yu examines this loss of personal control at a time when we should feel the most safe.Â
Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and her actor husband Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are very much in love and are on the brink of bringing their first child into the world. But prior to the birth, Hyun-su developed a sleep disorder that causes him to sleepwalk. Soo-jin awakens to find him scratching his face one night, eating from the fridge, and then trying to climb out of a window. They seek a medical explanation for this behavior before the baby is born, but even after beginning treatment, the frightening behavior escalates until Soo-jin begins to believe that there is an evil presence at work in her husband.
What makes Sleep work is that this movie looks at the loss of control from multiple angles. Sleepwalking is the most obvious, but even beyond that, there is the element of pregnancy, when your body is largely out of your control. There is the aspect of having a newborn that upends your life in ways that you can’t always prepare yourself to deal with. And there is the perspective of being in an apartment building, where you have neighbors whose actions are outside of your control. By blending all of these elements together, the film creates a slightly off-balance sense that carries throughout.
It’s tough to characterize this movie as a slow-burn story because the sleepwalking begins relatively quickly and amps up fast as well, but even so, the heart of the story takes a long time to unfold. This makes the pacing feel a bit uneven, though that could be intentional to add to the sense of unease.Â
The performances from both Jung Yu-mi and Lee Sun-kyun are fantastic. They balance this need for everything to be normal while also recognizing that things are a problem but grow increasingly frantic as the movie progresses. They have a fantastic chemistry together, and the tragic death of Lee Sun-kyun is a huge loss for Korean film, and ultimately for all film-lovers.
Sleep looks fantastic. Yu was an assistant director to Academy Award winner Bong Joon Ho, and you can see his influence on this. The lighting in the movie is constantly shifting subtly until the final scene, when everything is bathed in a red glow. It is both beautiful and eerie at the same time.
Any time that you’re watching an international film, there are going to be some differences from the way American movies are made and stories are told in America. But Sleep is a great reminder that across cultures, we still like to be in control of our lives and that a loss of that control can feel frightening. And that at the end of the day, all any of us want is a good night’s sleep.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on September 5, 2024.