Sleep (2023)

Director: Jason Yu

I love Korean movies. Full stop. When my husband was trying to prove his love for me, he did the standard “Let’s go to the movies. You pick the film!” Little did he know my penchant for quirky, independent and preferably foreign films. We went to the Harris Theater in dawn-tahn Pittsburgh to see a Korean film, Take Care of My Cat (2001), an adorable coming of age film. To this day, he will not watch movies with me (LOL!). He has stood his ground as a married man. No need to impress me anymore. It was Take Care of My Cat when I realized how much I loved Korean films, although now I have gravitated from the innocent character-building Korean films to the downright twisted and backstabbing types. Sleep started out sweet, but ended up being one of them.

It was a psych thriller with some elements of dark humor. Should I laugh, should I wince? The main characters are a newlywed couple with a bun in da oven. One night, the husband speaks in his sleep (“someone’s in the house”), the next night he is walking, the next night he is eating raw meat from the fridge, the next night the adorable Pomeranian….(I’ll stop!). Needless to say, this pattern only worsens, not self-corrects.

At first, the wife is sympathetic and wants to help. They see a doctor. He’s diagnosed with a disorder that I wasn’t sure was real or made up for the film. REM Sleep Disorder Behavior. Quick Google search = real (?). You tell me. The doctor seems like a hack and who knows if he’s actually treating him properly or not. Things get worse. There is a very funny scene when the fussy mom-in-law hires the local shaman to rid the demon from her son-in-law. Apparently, shamanism is quite big in Korea, and the shamans are typically women as per the film.

The wife starts to lose it. He’s not improving. She’s convinced he will kill the baby when it arrives (I would too!) and …it arrives during the movie. She’s now convinced that the ghost of the pesky (but now deceased) neighbor who always complained about their amorous pursuits above him, has now entered the body of her sleepwalking husband. She has a plot to test that theory, and it is now up to you to watch the BIZARRE end of the film to see if it worked.

What Did I Like Best About This Movie? I loved the Actors! The husband (Lee Sun-kyun) was handsome, naive, fun-loving. The wife (Jung Yu-mi) was pretty, and we see her act out traits from nurturing to confused to concerned to a crazed lunatic. She can scream! I will be following her. Unfortunately, Lee Sun-kyun took his life at the end of 2023, in what I read as a spade of suicides among Korean actors at that time. Quite young. I also loved the set design of the final scene were the husband comes back to the apartment to try and regain control of his beloved wife, and that is when she is full on prepared for a proper exorcism or bust! It was wild. And there is a drill involved. Hmmm…

Where Did I See This Movie? I got it on DVD from the library. I am on a break from subscriptions.