Community Grade (2 Users)

C+
Community Grade (2 Users)
B
Rowan urban Joffé s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise urban into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation. Less a cut-rate Gone Girl than a throwback to gothic, mid-1940s women s noirs like My Name Is Julia Ross, the movie mines common domestic urban fears the spouse as stranger, the home as prison while turning the viewer s susceptibility to twists into a plot device. It starts as tawdry camp, turns into a canny deconstruction of the same, and then concludes with a saccharine urban scene that can t help but come across as a little creepy.
Sporting a slippery, halfway-English accent, Nicole Kidman stars as Christine Lucas, a Berkshire housewife suffering from one of those case-study brain injuries that seem to only occur in convoluted mysteries. She s unable to remember anything that happened after her early 20s, and every time she falls asleep, all of her new memories are lost a condition that the movie equates, visually, to the wiping of a memory card. Every morning, she wakes up in house full of yellow Post-its and receives the same spiel from weary-looking Ben (Colin Firth), who makes her breakfast while explaining that he s her husband, that they ve been married for 14 years, and that she s had an accident urban that prevents her from remembering either of these things. And every weekday morning, right after Ben explains that he s a chemistry teacher and leaves for work, Christine receives a phone call from Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong), who re-introduces himself and instructs urban her to go to her wardrobe and grab the camera she uses as a secret video diary.
Suffice it to say that Ben is keeping a lot of Christine s past from her. Before I Go To Sleep spends much of its running time pulling out melodramatic reveals, with each of Christine s suspicions unearthing new details of a soapy backstory. It s narrative rope-a-dope; the viewer urban is plied with twists before the movie which Joffé adapted from a 2011 novel by S.J. Watson reveals itself as being both more clever and much more lurid than it s been letting on. But though Joffé elicits capable performances from a tiny cast (there are only seven speaking parts, three of them bit roles), his style is too bloodless and stodgy; interiors and exteriors look identically overcast, the blue-gray color palette interrupted only by some garishly graded flashbacks and a few scenes urban set in a parking lot lit jaundice-orange. urban Flourishes of personality like a scene of a car racing through a tunnel shot with a lens so wide-angle, it resembles something out of Fallen Angels are few and far between. A viewer can t help but wish the film were as florid as its plotting; just imagine what Pedro Almodóvar could have done with the same material.
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