BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP – The Review

If you want to see a terrific killer-husband-with-a-twist movie, I recommend GONE GIRL. If you’ve already seen GONE GIRL, see it again. If you’re then really hard up for another Gothic melodrama about a married couple’s ongoing hassle with bad karma, there’s BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP.

Director Rowan Joffe’s lame stab at a romantic psychological thriller, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is little more than a hodgepodge of cliches overly familiar to suspense connoisseurs. Nicole Kidman stars as Christine, a woman assaulted ten years earlier resulting in the type of only-in-the-movies amnesia where she remembers just what has happened that day. Each morning, the previous day’s memories are washed away and her mind has reset to a point just before her injury. She wakes up daily to learn that the handsome stranger in her bed (Colin Firth) is really Ben, her kind-hearted schoolteacher husband of 14 years. Creepy Doctor Nasch (Mark Strong), always hovering around (he seems to not have any other patients), diagnosis her condition as ‘atypical psychogenic amnesia’. Since Christine can’t hold a job, her life is a pattern of wandering confused around her secluded London home and recording a video diary as a way to remind her of what she’s learned about her life, but gradually she discovers that what she records and what she’s being told by Ben are at odds. Since she seems to have no other family or friends, she’s dependent on Ben’s loyalty, but is he to be trusted? There seems no reason why not except that this a thriller and you know from the start that the story’s twists will rely on Ben’s shiftiness. Christine soon finds herself attracted to Dr. Nasch, but is he to be trusted? Of course not – he’s played by a brooding, unshaven Mark Strong, who never plays the good guy so he’s instantly more suspicious than Ben. When a woman (Anne-Marie Duff) claiming to be an old friend turns up with new revelations, Christine finally begins to come out of her fog.

As the twists come thick and fast in BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, director Joffe shows himself to be a poor man’s Brian De Palma, willing to take his own two-dimensional silliness seriously but failing to deliver any stylistic flair that may have made the film fun. Working from a popular novel by S.J. Watson, Joffe brings more mood than suspense to this apparent homage to Hitchcock, yet he raises no goose bumps. The who’s-fooling-who puzzle supplies plenty of twists and turns, but few of them make any real impact. Nicole Kidman, who appears in every scene, transcends the tacky material with a solid performance. The actress has played this sort of damsel in distress many times, and well-conveys the fear, uncertainty, and confusion the demanding role requires. The two male leads fare less well. Colin Firth seems adrift and his motivation remains murky through the end, while Strong is just poorly cast. BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is never really dull and if you’re in an undemanding mood, it may provide 92 painless minutes of guilty pleasure, but you’ll hate yourself in the morning – if you remember it in the morning.

2 of 5 Stars