Director: Jason Yu 
Starring: Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 95 mins

Sleep is the directorial debut of Jason Yu, a South Korean black comedy horror mystery thriller. Hyeon-soo (Lee Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) are newlyweds and one night, Soo-jin discovers her husband sleepwalking. His nighttime antics get increasingly severe and with Soo-jin heavily pregnant, she’s worried harm could come to her newborn. The film received acclaim where it played in the Critics’ Week at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, an initiative aimed at discovering and supporting new talents. 

Much to my disappointment, I lost patience with Sleep pretty early in and found the 95 minutes to really drag. My main problem with it is its complete lack of logic – it’s absolutely riddled with plot holes. The film struggles to satisfy its genre intentions – it’s not scary whatsoever and lacks tension on the horror front. From a black comedy perspective, I didn’t find its humour funny at all but perhaps some of its intended humour is lost in translation. The plot is generally all over the place and the direction the narrative ultimately heads in is very unsatisfying. 

There’s no character development of the two newlyweds – all we really know about Hyeon-soo is that he’s an actor and we learn nothing about Soo-jin. You don’t need a fully fleshed out character every time for a film to work but I struggled to empathise with them. What’s more, a character’s mental shift feels sudden and completely unearned. 

The score by Hyuk-jin Chang and Yong-jin Chang aggressively doesn’t fit the film and veers between different genres. Cinematographer Tae-soo Kim fails to make the most of what is mainly one location (a block of flats and an apartment, although there are some scenes set in different places). It never settles on a visual style and the film looks drab. 

It’s a real shame because the idea of someone sleepwalking to dangerous effect is horrific. With the right hands and a more intimate, atmospheric approach, there’s a lot of potential here. But Sleep is an utter logic-defying car crash and I’m genuinely surprised at the very positive critical reception.