Before I Go to Sleep

Rowan Joffe's Before I Go to Sleep is a low-rent thriller spruced up with an A-list cast.  The mystery behind the film has an effective Hitchcock-like vibe early on, but it doesn't take long for the script (also by Joffe, adapted from a novel by S.J. Watson) to descend into lurid melodrama.  I've not read the source novel, so I can't say if this is the fault of a bad adaptation, or if the book followed the same path.  All I know is these actors and this premise deserve better.

The heroine of the story, Christine (Nicole Kidman), awakens every morning with no knowledge of the past 16 years.  She suffered an accident of some sort in her early 20s, and now wakes up every morning with no memory of anything that has happened since then.  She is 40 now, and wakes up in the morning with a strange man beside her in her bed, who just happens to be her long-suffering husband (Colin Firth).  He does what he can to jog her memory with a wall of photos portraying their life together, and gives her information about herself that she has no memory of.  After her husband leaves for work, Christine gets a phone call from a psychiatrist (Mark Strong) that she's been seeing for a while, and has been encouraging her to keep a video journal so that she can watch what she recorded the day before and learn more about herself.  However, from watching the videos, Christine quickly realizes that something is not right, and that someone in her life may not be telling the truth about her, or even themselves.

Here's where Christine, and we the audience, start questioning the information being given.  Who is the mysterious red-headed woman that Christine has flashes of memory of?  Was she really in an accident, or was she attacked and found discarded and naked with no memory as some mysterious newspaper articles she stumbles across seem to suggest?  Can her husband be trusted?  Why does he seem to be withholding certain details from her?  Is the psychiatrist lying to her?  The brief and cryptic flashbacks that Christine begins to have hint at something sinister behind the scenes, and slowly bur surely, the answers are revealed.  The movie has no problem with plot twists and revelations, and there are even a couple good ones here.  The real problem behind the movie is that none of them are thrilling, and the movie seems incapable of building tension.

Before I Go to Sleep is a surprisingly laid back thriller.  It's low energy all the time, even when Christine should be running for her life, and the terror should be mounting.  There's never a moment where we feel that the lead character's life is in danger until the final act, and when it finally happens, it's so ludicrous and over the top that it's hard to take it all that seriously.  I can understand wanting to go subtle with the suspense in a story like this, but the problem is, there is never any real suspense.  We don't find ourselves holding our breath, waiting for the next forgotten or hidden secret to be revealed.  The film seems to realize the lack of tension it is creating, so it goes the cheap route, and throws in a couple pointless jump scares now and then that have nothing to do with the story.  They exist solely to jolt the audience.  You're doing something wrong if you're supposed to be making a psychological thriller, and your only means of getting a response out of your audience is to have a truck driving by the main character, blaring its car horn for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

You would think that big talents like Kidman, Firth and Strong could lift up this material and make it work, but everybody seems to be cashing a paycheck here.  Earlier this year, Firth and Kidman played husband and wife in the much better The Railway Man, and showed great chemistry together.  What happened here, I have no idea.  Firth often comes across as being bored, and never truly sells the fact that he loves this woman, and wants to help her get her memory back, or at least lead a normal life without them.  To be fair, the plot does kind of explain how this could be the case at one point, but it's forced and unconvincing.  Everybody here is working below their ability.  This naturally leads to the question of what are they doing in this material in the first place, and why didn't Joffe take more advantage of their talents?

Before I Go to Sleep starts out tantalizing us with its mystery and numerous questions, but eventually goes off the rails into silliness.  It has all the markings of a production that even the cast seemed to have their doubts about.  They really should have spent some time working out the script's problems before going before the camera.  For whatever reason, they did not, so they end up on screen looking like they're trapped in a thriller that they know isn't working.

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