An expectant mother fears something sinister is behind her husband's
increasingly disturbing nocturnal habits.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jason Yu
Starring: Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun, Kim Gook-hee, Kim Geum-soon, Seo Yi-sook
If the job of a horror filmmaker is to create nightmares, perhaps it's
no surprise that so many horror movies have explored the idea of what we
experience while we sleep. Usually it's in the form of nightmares that
threaten to escape the protagonist's subconscious and infiltrate the
real world, ala Nightmare on Elm Street. With his feature debut Sleep, writer/director Jason Yu has flipped this idea. The
apprehension here isn't generated by our fears over what might happen to
someone as they sleep, but what that sleeping person might do to others
while in a somnambulistic state.
Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyeon-soo (Lee Sun-kyun, who
sadly passed away before he could enjoy the fruits of his newfound fame
courtesy of his role in Oscar winner
Parasite) are happily married and expecting their first child. One night
Hyeon-soo suddenly jolts up in bed and proclaims "Someone's inside!"
This freaks out Soo-jin, especially as her husband is in an unresponsive
catatonic state. Sneaking downstairs she discovers all is well and
returns to bed. The following morning Hyeon-soo claims to have no
recollection of the incident.
It's merely the beginning of a series of increasingly disturbing
mishaps that befall Hyeon-soo in his sleeping hours. He scratches his
face so badly that it all but kills his budding acting career. Soo-jin
finds him eating raw meat and crunching on raw eggs in the middle of the
night. When Soo-jin discovers the family dog frozen in their fridge,
it's time for Hyeon-soo to get professional help.
Soo-jin ignores her mother's pleas to seek spiritual advice and instead
takes her hubby to a doctor who prescribes medicine and gives some
advice on how best to live with the condition. When the pills prove
useless and the couple's baby arrives, Hyeon-soo offers to rent an
apartment so he can sleep alone and avoid putting their newborn at risk.
Soo-jin is having none of this suggestion, insisting that they have to
work through their problems together. But as she starts to grow
increasingly paranoid about the threat her husband poses to her baby,
Soo-jin decides to take her mother's advice and enlist the aid of a
shaman (Kim Geum-soom).
What makes Yu's film so distinctive is how it plays with the classic
horror trope of the rational protagonists who are forced to seek
unconventional help in the form of a religious or spiritual figure. This
figure usually saves the day, but in Sleep the arrival of
a shaman only serves to make things far worse. While Soo-jin and
Hyeung-soo's relationship was previously tested by his condition, they
now find themselves bickering over philosophical differences. Hyeung-soo
laughs off the shaman's suggestion that a demon is inhabiting his body
while he sleeps, but Soo-jin buys into the idea. Where Hyeung-soo
initially posed a potential threat to Soo-jin, the reverse becomes true
as her paranoia leads her to view Hyeung-soo not as her husband but as a
demon in her husband's body.
Yu wisely keeps the truth ambiguous, and even as the credits roll
viewers will be debating what exactly they just witnessed.
Sleep can either be interpreted as a straightforward
supernatural thriller or an examination of how desperate people can be
radicalised by religion when they can't find solutions elsewhere.
The final act veers into disturbing and visceral territory but much of
the film is played for laughs. Yu successfully balances the black comedy
with the growing tension. The more laughable the scenario gets, the more
sinister it becomes as it's clear Soo-jin and Hyeung-soo are out of
their depth. A lot of humour is generated by Hyeong-soo's indifference
to the effect his condition is having on his wife, because he's asleep
when every bit of madness occurs. Sun-kyun has a talent for making us
laugh simply by pretending to be asleep; there's something indefinably
hilarious about the blank expression on his dozing face. Anyone who
knows the frustration of a spouse who is able to sleep while a baby
yells will feel for Soo-jin's predicament, but will have to laugh at the
comedy the situation generates.
Yu pokes fun at the trite framed and wood-carved homilies with which
Soo-jin has adorned the walls of her home, giving it the impression of a
giant Instagram page. In the final act they're replaced by yellow strips
adorned with prayers and incantations as Soo-jin completely loses the
plot. Yu appears to suggest that the self-help industry is simply the
modern world's evolution of shamanism, but he leaves it up to the viewer
to ultimately decide if that's a positive or a negative.
