Jason Yu’s Sleep is about a woman, Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), whose husband, Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), suffers from a sleeping disorder that may or may not be supernatural in origin. As the newlyweds are pushed to the breaking point, Wu’s film does a fine job of toying with our expectations about whether or not a malevolent force is actually at play here, managing to make the possibility that there isn’t feel every bit as thrilling as the possibility that there is.
Sleep generates much of its tension from observing the couple’s responses to Hyun-su’s problem. At first, the disorder manifests as self-harm, with Hyun-su scratching his face so badly that he’s let go from one of the few jobs that the nascent actor has landed. But as Hyun-su’s behavior grows more erratic, he begins to direct his violent impulses elsewhere, like at the family dog, and soon he’s wearing oven mitts, zipping himself up in a sleeping bag, and, finally, sleeping in a padlocked room once Soo-jin begins to fear for her life and that of her child.
One senses that the unaddressed root of the couple’s problem is a certain obstinacy demonstrated by the mantra plaque that Soo-jin points to on their wall: “Together, we can overcome anything.” She rejects Hyun-su’s suggestion that he rent a hotel room for himself, and she won’t let him sleep in the car, because not only would these solutions fail to keep up appearances, they would indicate to the world that they’ve thrown their hands up in the air.
Sleep doesn’t dive as deeply into Soo-jin’s hang-ups as it could have. Yu’s script favors sparse characterization, stripping away anything that isn’t strictly necessary to inform how the couple reacts to their predicament. In that regard, the film is a little too neat to be truly shocking or inventive, but it does manage a few memorable payoffs; one in particular finds the fastidious, business-minded Soo-jin giving one of cinema’s few climactic PowerPoint presentations.
Only late in the film, which is largely set in the couple’s apartment, does anyone propose that a ghost might be responsible for Hyun-su’s sudden symptoms. At its best, Sleep smartly positions the possibility of that being true as an almost mundane alternative to a medical diagnosis. A ghost, after all, can be exorcised. A sleep disorder that no one fully understands is worse, as demonstrated by Soo-jin lashing out at a doctor who can’t offer them a concrete solution.
Rather than relying on scenes of Hyun-su terrorizing his family for the full runtime, Sleep takes a bracing turn as Soo-jin comes to embrace the supernatural, flipping our sympathies as we witness how far she’s willing to go in service of those beliefs. Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.
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