Starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun  

Written and Directed by Jason Yu

Lewis Pictures, in cinemas now.

Soo-jin must figure out how to stop her husband’s increasingly nightmarish sleepwalking before he harms himself or his young family.

For the second time this week, a movie has felt the need to show its workings on screen. The day before settling down to Jason Yu’s Korean nocturnal chiller, Sleep, I caught up with Longlegs, a film mostly devoid of structure, but which advertises each of its three acts with an introductory slate in the hope that the viewer might be fooled into thinking the movie has some kind of narrative shape. Coincidentally, Sleep employs similar onscreen slates to alert us to its aspirations to classical story structure.

With apologies to William Shakespeare, these movies doth protest too much, methinks.

The first two acts of Sleep are actually pretty good. It’s an engaging premise. Soo-jin (skittishly played by Yung Yu-mi) is heavily pregnant, not the time you want your young husband (Lee Sun-kyun) to take up perilous somnambulism. At first, both the cause and the cure seem to be reassuringly rooted in medical science. But as his nightly wanderings become more extreme, Soo-jin fears for the safety of her baby and resorts to less conventional solutions.

So far, so shamanic, and the world of South Korean modernity haunted by older, darker forces is compellingly rendered within the claustrophobic confines of the couple’s newly built apartment block.

Unfortunately, just after we are told that we are entering ‘Chapter Three’ of the story things start to fall apart. It’s months later, and all sorts of rather interesting stuff seems to have happened in the interim, all of which we have to be told about verbally in a very lengthy info-dump. Back in the days of projectionists hauling huge reels of celluloid onto hot, ticking, spinning magic lanterns, I might have been tempted to pop out to ask if they had got the reels in the wrong order. It feels as if a whole act has gone missing, and we’ve jumped straight to a rather unsatisfying resolution, centred on a character we’ve never met, with desires we’ve only just been introduced to.

It’s all deeply unsatisfying, which is a shame, because my story-structure head could imagine about three alternative resolutions all of which would have made the final act of the movie really fly.

Verdict: Sleep has much to commend it, but I contend that if a film maker feels obliged to label their structure it might be a warning sign that the movie is lacking a narrative engine of its own. Sleep is a watchable oddity but it’s not going to keep you awake at night… 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com