Her bloodshot eyes open to an unfamiliar scene—the same one she experiences every morning. Christine (Nicole Kidman) awakens in a blur and moves aside the hand of an unknown man draped across her chest. She stumbles for the bathroom as confusion fills her face. Her eyes widen at the photo collage taped to the bathroom wall, with captions reading “Our Wedding” and, naming the unknown man, “Ben Your Husband.” Christine looks down and finds a ring on her finger.
In the next room, waiting at the edge of the bed, sits Ben (Colin Firth). Unflappable as a Londoner during the blitz, he tells her the same story he has repeated morning after morning for 14 years, the one about the head injury that left her remembering nothing after her early 20s and unable to recall the events of the previous day when she awakens.
Based on the novel by S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep is a suspenseful contemporary thriller that taps into a vein of movies popular in the 1940s. The woman-suffering-from-amnesia picture was almost a subgenre, a facet of women-in-jeopardy dramas that addressed the vulnerability of female protagonists in a threatening world dominated by dubious males. In Before I Go to Sleep, Christine finds herself between two mysterious men, Ben and a neuropsychologist, Dr. Nash (Mark Strong). Cautioning her not to tell her husband, Nash picks her up each day for a therapy session and encourages her to keep a video diary on a camera hidden in a shoebox from Ben’s prying eyes. Since Christine forgets each session after going to sleep, Nash begins the process again each morning.
Christine might have reason to suspect the doctor’s motives. And yet, through Nash, she realizes that Ben has been keeping secrets. The “accident” she endured was really a violent assault that left her for dead. Other lies and deceptions will surface. Although the screenplay includes many points that may or may not hold up on a second viewing, it establishes Christine’s uneasy, precarious reality and gradually builds a sense of impending dread—even if observant moviegoers will see the twists shortly before they occur.
Excellent acting, especially on Kidman’s part, helps keep the story engaging. Writer-director Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later) manages the neat trick of keeping the necessary repetition of the plot from sinking into dull redundancy. He also endows Before I Go to Sleep with visual style, painting every scene in the emotionally dark hues of early winter.
