A woman wakes up in the night to find her husband bolt upright in bed talking in his sleep. “Someone is inside,” he says, before sparking back out again. The next day she asks him about what he said the night before. It was a line from a script I’ve been reading, her actor-husband tells her dismissively.
The next night something a bit different. The husband starts scratching at his face uncontrollably while apparently asleep. The wife wakes him up and quietens him down, then she goes back to sleep and so does her husband. But in the morning his face is a mass of bloody red scratches so bad that make-up will not cover them. He loses his role in the show he was in.
And so begins the quietly elegant Sleep, a tale of escalating paranoia and oblique horror (initially at least) from director Jason Yu, one-time assistant director to Bong Joon Ho.
The wife, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is pregnant and what comes next can easily be read the story as an externalisation of anxiety about giving birth for the first time. However, Yu, who also wrote the story, does not go for easy metaphors and keeps several ideas in play right to the film’s final moments – are these night time terrors something to do with the pregnancy? Is the man possessed by something? Maybe he gaslighting the wife? Or perhaps she’s gaslighting him? All seem possible. There’s even a convenient downstairs neighbour, who complains about the noise Soo-jin and Hyun-Su (Lee Sun-kyun) make, just like the now-dead previous neighbour used to, even though they’re quiet as mice.
Though other characters also intrude – Soo-jin’s mother and a batty psychic she drags in to diagnose the problem, a doctor who specialises in sleep disorders (science balancing juu-juu) – for the most part this is a two hander set almost entirely inside the apartment the couple share with a fluffy white Pomeranian.
With its gotcha fake and real scares, for a while it looks like Yu is redoing Alien, except set in a South Korean highrise rather than deepest space, with Soo-jin as a Ripley stand-in and the toy dog as her cat. Then the obvious comparisons with Rosemary’s Baby start to arise, especially as delivery day gets nearer.
Yu keeps them both just there, as merest suggestions, working up his own brand of slightly hyper-real paranoia in dark, clean spaces, using stark compositions which he eventually swaps out for the full tonto horror package as the finale comes into view – Argento-style red lighting, the use of a power drill, some starey-eyed acting, from the never less than entirely brilliant Jung Yu-mi, the actress Yu had in mind while he was writing the script.
Yes, maybe the wife should have asked the husband to sleep in the car. Maybe the husband should have gone to an AirBnB rather than subject his pregnant wife to night after night of escalating weirdness. Both suggestions reasonable people might have considered.
Yu succeeds (just about) in getting around these objections by constantly shifting the source of the problem, from the paranormal to the physical, from her to him, to downstairs. Medication. Spells. A powwow with the angry neighbour. At one point, almost laughably, he even suggests the nocturnal interrruptions might be down to a flat battery in a piece of domestic kit.
It doubtless helped the film domestically that co-star Lee Sun-kyun (who you may remember from Parasite) committed suicide not long after the film debuted, which adds an extra ghoulish quality Yu could not have factored in when he cast the highly popular actor.
For all that popularity, this is not his film and he’s properly opaque as Hyun-su, a man who might be possessed, or mad, or psychologically ill, or, just maybe, needs nothing more than a good night’s sleep.
Sleep – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
