Anyone who decides to tackle the sub-genre of the “amnesiac thriller” must know that comparisons with Christopher Nolan’s Memento are inevitable. They should also acknowledge that Memento set the bar pretty high for films that use the subjective nature of truth and memory for thrill fodder.
Throughout Before I Go to Sleep, which is adapted from the novel by SJ Watson, the comparison is impossible to ignore. It’s like a memory-jogging Post-it note, stuck somewhere permanently in your field of vision. It’s a comparison that doesn’t flatter this Hitchcock-alike potboiler, which stars Nicole Kidman as a woman who was robbed of all memories formed since her early twenties by a violent attack perpetrated by a man she can’t recall. While Memento was as dangerous, mercurial and as light on its feet as a knife fighter, Before I Go to Sleep lumbers around, barging and shoving the audience in various directions with clumsy devices and the occasional fraudulent red herring.
For the role of Christine, the woman with an Etch A Sketch for a brain that is wiped clean every night by sleep, Kidman deploys her spooky face from The Others. Her performance is all in the eyes — wide open, panicky, darting from side to side as she tries to add up the daily mystery of her life.
Each fresh morning reintroduces her to husband Ben (Colin Firth) who, face baggy with grief and resignation, patiently explains the facts of her life now. He guides her to a whiteboard in the kitchen, on it a crib sheet for daily life; her allergies and suggested activities for the day are listed in large, non-threatening letters. He reassures her that he loves her. She recoils as though he has threatened to sell one of her kidneys on the black market. With no memories to back up his version of events, Christine has to trust her husband. And that’s something she is not entirely inclined to do.
And who can blame her? From the outset, director Roland Joffé crams every shot, every scene with peril and threat. Ben potters around the kitchen listening to the radio. The Supremes’ You Keep Me Hanging On is playing and Joffé makes sure we hear Diana Ross belting out the lines, “Set me free, why don’t you babe. Get out my life, why don’t you babe. Because you don’t really love me . . .” Seeds of doubt are planted elsewhere too. Car tyres screech like murder victims; forklift trucks hurtle across the frame, narrowly missing Christine; jumbo jets roar overhead; dustbin lorries thunder past with blaring horns and rumbling wheels. We get it — without the framework of a memory, Christine has no reference points to judge the world around her. Everything is a potential danger. But does Joffé really have to turn the film into some kind of lurid fairground ride full of horror-film editing and bangs and crashes on the soundtrack?
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Christine’s paranoia might be justified. A neuropsychologist called Dr Nasch (the casting of Mark Strong rings its own set of alarm bells) calls her and explains that he has been treating her, covertly, without her husband’s knowledge, for the past couple of weeks. At his suggestion, she starts to keep a video diary, which she re-watches every morning. It soon becomes clear that hubby Ben is re-editing the details of their life. In his version of events it is a car crash that claimed her memory, while Christine learns that she was beaten and left for dead. Then there’s the little matter of whether or not they have a child together. But then Ben, quite reasonably, explains that sometimes he just can’t face telling her the whole awful truth. Can you blame him for sugar-coating it a little? Likewise, the doctor’s motives seem a little suspect, particularly when he gazes soulfully into his patient’s weirdly expressionless face and rests his hand intimately on hers. And why do they always have to meet in blighted car parks and industrial estates? Does he not have an office?
The really frustrating thing about the film is that it almost works. Firth is impressive, conveying enough sympathetic ambiguity to feed the smouldering paranoia that seeps through the story. Cast against type, Strong brings with him the slipstream of shadiness from previous roles that colours our perception of him in this character. You can even make a case for Kidman’s impassive performance — she is, after all, a blank slate. Personality is largely composed of life’s experiences, so perhaps it makes sense that hers is missing in action, along with her memory. What you can’t excuse, however, are the ludicrous contrivances, the self-important silliness and preposterous character swerves that defy rational explanation. Even these problems might not have proved terminal, were it not for the fact that Joffé approaches the material in such a stodgy, straight-faced manner. The open-goal title says it all: this film is a bit of a snooze. Roland Joffé, 15, 91min