SLEEP

"Someone's inside." Two words begin writer/director Jason Yu's feature debut Sleep, uttered by a slumbering Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) sitting at the end of his bed. This terrifies his wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and is the beginning of a long line of erratic, disturbing behaviour. Is it a sleep disorder or something more sinister? A subtle horror about the anxieties of marriage and new parenthood, Sleep deprives its protagonists of vital rest, instead sending them into a waking nightmare of somnambulism and threat — mainly to the couple's extremely cute Pomeranian, Pepper, but also, you know, the baby.

Sleep doesn't reinvent the wheel as a slow-burn, possibly supernatural horror, instead leaning on well-worn markers of the genre — the increasingly shocking events, the enlisting of a medium, the race to discover the truth. However, Lee and Jung give intense performances that make the film feel fresh. At the same time, cinematographer Tae-soo Kim and editor Meeyeon Han find unique ways to capture the inside of a small apartment for maximum tension. Both Soo-jin and Hyun-su fear what the other is capable of, with the film pivoting from one parent's unconscious fears to the other's over the course of a sharp 90 minutes.* — S.C.

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