The sleep of reason is what’s supposed to produce monsters … but not as many as sleep deprivation. That is the awful paradox driving this elegant, intimate, gleefully brash Korean chiller from feature first-timer Jason Yu, a former assistant to the Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho. It’s a horror movie about sleepwalking and the unquiet sleep of a fraught marriage, with hints of The Exorcist, Sleeping With the Enemy and Steven Soderbergh’s neglected Hitchcockian thriller Side Effects.
Korean leading man Lee Sun-kyun appears posthumously in this movie – having heartbreakingly taken his own life last December following a tabloid media scandal. Poignantly, he gives one of his best performances as Hyun-su, an up-and-coming actor who has already won some kind of indie award and landed a minor role in a big studio film. He is happily married to Soo-jin, played by Jung Yu-mi, an estate agent who is heavily pregnant with their first child; she has evidently put off maternity leave until the last moment, perhaps because they are reliant on her steady pay. They live blissfully in a small flat, with Hyun-su using his acting talent to do a hilarious impression of the grumpy old guy in the downstairs flat who complains about being kept awake by their lovemaking. They have a sweet pomeranian dog called Pepper, but all horror devotees naturally worry about the safety of any pet in this kind of film.
