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Movie Review: 'Before I Go to Sleep'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- There will be no dozing off during Before I Go to Sleep, a wackadoodle mystery thriller about an extravagant case of amnesia, but there will be precious little cerebral satisfaction either.

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

Oscar winners Nicole Kidman (2002's The Hours) and Colin Firth (2011's The King's Speech) played husband and wife in last year's The Railway Man and do so again in Before I Go To Sleep.

But whereas she supported him last time out, this time he returns the favor.  The former title refers to him, the latter to her.

Ahhh, symmetry.

Kidman plays Christine Lucas, a fortysomething Brit and a vulnerable amnesiac who starts each day with no memory of anything since her early twenties, her condition presumably the result of a traumatic accident of some sort in her past that has left her unable to form and retain new memories.

As time goes on, truths emerge that bring all of her ordinary assumptions about her life and the people in it into question.

Firth plays her husband Ben, whom she wakes up next to each morning in a house in suburban London that she's unfamiliar with, sure that she has never before seen this man who claims to be her husband.  And each day, he assures her that that's who he is and that she suffered a car accident a decade ago.

Immediately after he leaves each morning to go to work, the telephone rings and it's one Dr. Nasch, a neuropsychologist at a local hospital played by Mark Strong, who claims to be surreptitiously treating her against Ben's wishes.

Every day on the phone, Nasch reminds her that she's been keeping a video diary as a mnemonic aid -– and that she should continue to keep this from Ben.  He also tells her that her memory loss was not the result of a car accident but that she had been attacked and left for dead.

As a result of her treatments and flashbacks that she has been having, Christine comes to recall that she had a son, a fact which Ben claims to have kept from her because the son died of meningitis at age eight and Ben didn't want to upset her.

Christine also recalls a redheaded close friend of hers named Claire, played by Anne-Marie Duff, who ended contact with them after Ben placed Christine in an assisted care facility, divorced her, then brought her home.

The pieces of the puzzle just keep on multiplying.

But whom can she believe?  Is everyone being honest?   More to the point, is anyone being honest?

Directing a feature for a second time, Rowan Jaffe (Brighton Rock), who also wrote the screenplays for 28 Weeks Later and The American, based his suspenseful but overly sober script on the 2011 best-seller by SJ Watson.

Even though the premise is, by any standards, wildly contrived and nearly bursting early on with exposition, the setup is absolutely intriguing.  But the narrative paints itself into a corner that it cannot clamber out of without resorting to a level of potboiler melodrama that will disenfranchise all but the most indulgent viewers.

Although maybe that's half the what's-going-on-here fun of it.

Kidman has always been effective in roles in which she's threatened, bewildered, and vulnerable but ultimately admirably resourceful.  And she's well matched with both Firth and Strong.

Not to flirt too dangerously with spoiler spills, but at various times Before I Go to Sleep will put you in mind of such thematically overlapping (and superior) classics as Gaslight, Memento, and Spellbound.

Enough (and perhaps too much) said.

So we'll forget 2½ stars out of 4.  Ludicrous on the face of it but undeniably diverting, this psychological puzzler won't be rewarded with awards and won't add up in retrospect.

But it won't put anyone to sleep either.

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