'Before I Go To Sleep' - Review

Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) awakes in fright next to a man she doesn’t recognise, in a body that is too old and a house that is alien to her. The sleeping man is revealed to be her husband Ben (Colin Firth), who patiently explains to her that she was involved in an accident which has left her with a particular form of amnesia, to the extent that she wakes up every morning believing herself to be 26, when she is in fact 40, before promptly losing the information every time she sleeps. Before I Go To Sleep explores Christine’s paranoia and attempts to recollect her past with the help of Doctor Nash (Mark Strong).

The real key to the success of the film are the three leads. Kidman – who has spent a lot of her recent film roles looking rather embarrassed – lends a real sense of believable confusion and desperation to the central part. Colin Firth and Mark Strong have their usual goody and baddy stereotypes played around with in an interesting way, the former providing a very refreshingly different screen persona given his past record. Other characters are kept to the bare minimum, and the tight focus is extremely effective at building investment.

A great deal of snooty critics have had a problem with the opening twenty minutes, where Christine has to have her condition explained to her several times, and many have complained that it becomes repetitive and irritating. I on the other hand think they must’ve seen a different film, because I found myself gripped from the get-go, thrust into the heart of the drama. The slow descent into uncertainty is carefully handled, feeling slow and deliberate without padding out the running time.

Composer Edward Shearmur delivers a delicate, tick-tocking score that nicely complements the developing narrative, but knows exactly when to drop out, particularly in the incredibly tense final act, where any significant score would have felt like an unwanted interruption. The lead-up is properly gripping in a way that modern thrillers seldom are, providing a fair share of twists that are shocking yet stop short of being utterly ridiculous.

Whilst it may be true that the film doesn’t feel the need to fill the frame constantly with an array of useless side characters, I only wish that the frame itself was as carefully considered: the cinematography is nothing to shout about – with the possible exception of the opening close-up – and the whole picture has been laced with an irritating iron-grey tinge that serves only to dissipate the realism rather than enhance it. There is also one scene right at the very end that appears to have been shot entirely differently and could really do with being edited out completely to create a more cohesive story.

Saddled with a title and a premise that seem tailor-made for critical ridicule, Before I Go To Sleep manages to bring a lot more to bear than appearances would suggest, crafting an intricate and surprising web of lies and discovery that comes together in a gripping and entertaining thriller. I would recommend watching it as a double-bill with Danny Boyle’s Trance, another amnesiac thriller with similar themes of repressed trauma but handled very differently.

4 stars