‘Sleep’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Jason Yu. 2023. South Korea. 95 mins.  

A film called Sleep risks being taken as an invitation for weary filmgoers to grab forty winks – especially if it starts, as this one does, with the sound of loud snoring. But this larky South Korean chiller will keep viewers, if not on the edge of their seats, then certainly awake, as it rings imaginative and sometimes tricksy changes on a simple somnambulism premise. Sharp performances from Parasite star Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi (from Train to Busan), plus a snappy use of claustrophobic interiors, make this a highly exportable and cult-friendly debut by writer-director Jason Yu, previously AD to Bong Joon-ho. 

Sleep is a family-in-peril drama with similar domestic-trauma resonances to The Babadook.

Virtually a two-hander, with some eccentric support roles, Sleep is about a young couple who live in an apartment block with the kind of adorably fluffy dog that seems unlikely to make it through this kind of scarer in one piece. Hyun-su (Lee) is an award-winning screen actor, while Soo-jin (Jung) is an office worker currently pregnant with the couple’s first child, and with an indefatigably tenacious positivity – her motto being “Together We Can Overcome Anything”, as a folksy wall plaque asserts. 

One night, Hyun-su suddenly intones, “Someone is inside,” then promptly falls asleep, leaving Soo-jin to explore their darkened flat. An ominous thump seems nothing more than a door banging in the wind – but then, why has their new downstairs neighbour complained about loud noises coming from the flat for over a week? Hyun-su develops a worrying habit of scratching his face while he sleeps, leaving himself scarred and with bloody pillows. A doctor diagnoses an REM sleep disorder, but Soo-jin’s worried mother recommends spiritual help, and eventually enlists a shaman – a business-like, somewhat glamorous middle-aged woman. She sizes up the problem instantly: Soo-jin is living with two men, and one of them isn’t alive. 

With peril increasing for the household, now including newborn baby Ha-yoon, the determined Soo-jin takes every conceivable step to keep her husband’s dark side under control – while he, a loving dad and partner by day, starts having every reason to fear his previously solicitous wife. The really smart aspect of Sleep is the way it flips Soo-jin’s character: over time, it’s her anxiety and the extremity of her response that become alarming, with Jung Yu-mi’s performance strikingly shifting from nervous composure to full-on frenzy. 

Told in three chapters, the film makes brilliant use of limited spaces. Apart from the odd shift of locale – to a doctor’s office and, at one point, a clinic somewhere in the countryside – Sleep takes place almost entirely in the couple’s flat, sometimes seen as a cosy familial nest, but just as often turned by crafty lighting and slow-creeping camerawork into an enclosed labyrinth, in which the real dangers seem to come from the couple themselves. With its claustrophobic enclosure and play with family structures, Sleep is a family-in-peril drama with similar domestic-trauma resonances to, say, The Babadook.

Ultimately, though, the drama doesn’t quite pay off, despite a clever reveal about the identity of the couple’s unseen enemy, and  a climactic scene that ramps up the frenzy in the couple’s now totally transformed apartment, ripe for a supernatural showdown. The payoff is cleverly ambiguous, although director Yu somewhat mishandles the release of tension in the very final moments: a more emphatic last turn of the screw might have made all the difference. Still, Sleep is a mischievous genre exercise, with the ‘zzzz’ less likely to come from the audience than from the ominous power drill glimpsed in the first scene.