It’s not hard to see why sleep has, for so long, been a staple of the horror genre.
Whether it’s visions emerging through dreams, insomnia driving you to the brink of collapse, or waking up in the middle of the night to something just beyond the corner of your eye – sleep is an enormously vulnerable state, and the people we choose to share it with are usually those we trust the most.
And it’s that notion that director Jason Yu takes and runs with in his directorial debut, 2023’s Sleep. As newlyweds Hyeon-soo (Lee Sun-Kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-Mi) prepare to welcome their first child, Hyeon-soo begins to engage in a series of bizarre, destructive, and downright disturbing night time activities – which he claims he has no memory of in the morning.
It’s a great premise – a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde story, where one half of this man seems to be kind, loving, gentle, and a sweet and supportive partner, and the other a…well, let’s just say you shouldn’t leave any small dogs in his presence when he’s asleep and leave it at that. The relationship between Soo-jin and Hyeon-soo is well-developed and warm enough that you can’t help but find yourself rooting for them to figure it out; much like his long-time collaborator, Bong Joon-ho, Jason Yu finds a wit in the weirdness that casts everything in a distinctly more human light.
But it’s where the movie goes in the second half, as the focus of the plot shifts to Soo-jin after the birth of her child, that really elevated this out of solid thriller and into downright brilliant horror category. After Soo-jin gives birth, she is consumed by the belief that the death of a downstairs neighbour has somehow cursed the family and that her husband my inadvertently cause the death of their child due to the neighbour’s otherwordly influence on him.
Now, not only is this a killer performance from Jung Yu-mi, who gets her teeth into the rapid unravelling of Soo-jin and tears it off in chunks, but it’s a really fascinating metaphor for the fears that many women carry when they choose to have children with a partner – that they will make this commitment to someone, not just for themselves but for their child, who is carrying some darkness inside that it will be too late to run from. The film leaves things deliberately ambiguous with regards to whether Hyeon-soo’s disorder has some supernatural or mundane explanation, and you’re right there with Soo-jin, trying to figure out what version of her husband is the real one – and whether he might pose a threat to their child in either form. The way it captures those anxieties through the lens of horror is incredibly effective, especially when paired with the exceptional performance from Yu-mi to really drive home just how real this is for her.
Sleep is a weird, woozy, witty and utterly brilliant debut for Jason Yu – as much as it may leave you with a few sleepless nights, trust me, it’s worth it. What did you think of Sleep? And where does it rank in horror that deals with sleep (or the lack of it)? Let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Indiewire)
No But Listen 