Sleep review – marriage unravels in gleeful Korean somnambulist psycho-chiller
Lee Sun-kyun appears posthumously in one of his best performances as an actor struggling to control his night-time excursions in this elegant and intimate horror
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That is the awful paradox driving this elegant, intimate, gleefully brash Korean chiller from feature first-timer Jason Yu, a former assistant to the Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho.
Poignantly, he gives one of his best performances as Hyun-su, an up-and-coming actor who has already won some kind of indie award and landed a minor role in a big studio film.
He is happily married to Soo-jin, played by Jung Yu-mi, an estate agent who is heavily pregnant with their first child; she has evidently put off maternity leave until the last moment, perhaps because they are reliant on her steady pay.
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.
Kim Gook-hee gives an amusing, unsettling performance as their neighbour Min jeong who has a brattish son: she gets a dog exactly like theirs, something which Soo-jin interprets as an intolerable insult, for reasons she can’t fully explain.
The movie expertly hits funny notes and light-relief moments that give us a break from fear while promising more to come, while the couple’s relationship with this ambiguously friendly neighbour is effectively managed.
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