Directed and written by: Jason Yu.
Starring: Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
Runtime: 95 minutes.
Korean horror film ‘Sleep’ confronts demons in the dark
Sleep is easy to take for granted. It’s something your body just does. For a third of your life, your consciousness goes offline, a computer powering down to recharge. If you’re lucky, you don’t have to work at it – it just happens. Like breathing, it’s easy to take for granted. Until something goes wrong.
And it goes very wrong in the aptly titled psychological horror film “Sleep” by Korean filmmaker Jason Yu. His promising debut takes a simple premise, almost entirely set in the confines of one small apartment, and wrings it for all it’s worth in a tight 95 harrowing and darkly funny minutes.
Hyun-su and Soo-jin (played by Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi) are a picture-perfect young married couple. Sweet and loving with one another, and with their adorable fluffball Pomeranian named Pepper, they have a baby on the way, and Hyun-su’s acting career is going places. At night, the couple cuddle on the couch to watch his latest appearance in a TV show while he covers his face in mock embarrassment. On the wall hangs a wooden placard emblazoned with the motto of their marriage: “Together we can overcome anything”
“Sleep” puts that motto to the test.
Hyun-su, usually so peacefully asleep during the night, starts experiencing disturbances, small at first. His wife wakes to find him talking in his sleep. The next night, he begins scratching himself and wakes to find his hands and face bloody, Pepper shivering underneath the couple’s bed. Then, the sleepwalking begins. In the night, Soo-jin finds her husband, seemingly awake but not, eating raw meat from the fridge.
When the sleepwalking turns dangerous – almost deadly – they try creative solutions, like zipping Hyun-su tight in a sleeping bag with oven mitts on his hands. They go to the doctor for pills, even install a bell on the bedroom door to alert Soo-jin if her husband breaks free of his confines. When the baby comes, so small and so vulnerable, Soo-jin is driven to insomnia with vigilance, afraid of what her sleepwalking husband might do to their newborn daughter.
In a fit of sleep-deprived desperation, they invite a shaman into the apartment – a huckster, maybe, but it’s what she senses that turns this psychologically fraught domestic drama into a proper horror film.
Like the best of modern Korean horror, Yu’s smartly directed “Sleep” displays a delicate mastery of tone, deftly balancing the sweetness of the central relationship with psychological unraveling, supernatural terrors and devilishly black humor that makes the minutes fly even as not much is happening onscreen. It’s not reinventing any narrative wheels, but “Sleep” still unnerves in its understanding of the vulnerability of sleep: how much we need this basic function we take for granted, the particular insanity that descends when we don’t get enough of it and how fragile we are when we’re in the midst of it – especially if our partner is suddenly possessed by a malevolent force.
If you sleep at all after watching “Sleep,” it best be with one eye open.
Barbara’s ranking
3/4 stars
