Review of Sleep: A Korean somnambulist psycho-thriller in which a marriage falls apart.
Sleep deprivation is meant to create monsters, while the sleep of reason is supposed to produce less. That is the terrible dichotomy at the heart of this refined, personal, and joyfully brazen Korean thriller by feature debutant Jason Yu, who was formerly an assistant to the Oscar-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. There are shades of Steven Soderbergh’s underappreciated Hitchcockian thriller Side Effects, Sleeping With the Enemy, and The Exorcist in this sleepwalking horror film about a troubled marriage.
After tragically taking his own life in December due to a tabloid media scandal, Korean leading man Lee Sun-kyun makes a postmortem appearance in this film. Hyun-Su, promising young actor who has won an independent accolade and got a small part in a major studio picture. He delivers a moving performance, one of his finest. His wife, Soo-jin, played by Jung Yu-mi, is an estate agent and is seven months along in her pregnancy. She seems to have delayed taking maternity leave until the last minute, maybe because they depend on her consistent income. Hyun-su delightfully plays the cantankerous elderly man who lives in the apartment and their passion of kissing. They spend their happily ever after in a little unit. They have a wonderful Pomeranian named Pepper, but horror movie aficionados worry about any animal included.
Is Hyun-su secretly anxious about becoming a father? Or about his precarious career? Is he intuiting, perhaps, the possibility of postpartum depression in his wife? It could be the explanation for his strange somnambulist behaviour.
Soo-jin is exasperated by her husband’s snoring, but more worried still when it stops; she wakes to find him sitting upright, quietly saying: “Someone’s inside.” His sleepwalking becomes concerning, then terrifying, after the baby is born. Soo-jin doesn’t trust herself, or her husband, to go to sleep alongside him and addresses a timid question to her unconscious husband: “Would you harm our child?” He murmurs: “I don’t think so.”
Someone is inside, as he said. We are helpless to prevent the emergence of an unconscious presence, id, or alternate self while we sleep. Our already complex relationship with this secret partner becomes much more so due to the marital contract. A dedicated loving couple stays together, fights their troubles together; when Hyun-su’s difficulty first arises, he offers to live apart from his wife for a bit in a hotel room, but she says no. As they share a marital bed, they become one with each other and are constantly perceiving each other’s ids, even though they are only vaguely aware of each other’s resting and waking selves. It all starts with Hyun-su falling into the twilit somnambulist realm of non-sleep and Soo-jin being completely unable to sleep.
The character of their neighbor Min Jeong, played by Kim Gook-hee, is both entertaining and disturbing.
Min Jeong has a brattish son, and Soo-jin takes this as an insult for reasons she doesn’t understand. The movie deftly handles the couple’s connection with this ambiguously nice neighbor, and it also hits comedic notes and light-hearted moments that offer a welcome respite from the horror while hinting at what’s to come. Only when a supernatural explanation is brought up explicitly, along with a complete mental breakdown, does the film start to lose its delicate touch and its realistic details. However, a constant, on edge apprehension remains.
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