Before I Go To Sleep
Rowan Joffe (2014)
Ten years ago, Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) suffered brain damage that wipes her memory every night when she falls asleep. The man she wakes up in bed with next morning (Colin Firth) has to tell her each day (a) that he’s Ben, her husband of fourteen years, (b) what happened to Christine a decade ago and (c) that she’s now approaching forty – not, as she thinks, in her early twenties. (I didn’t get why the period of her memory loss extended so far back and so long before her brain injury – or how, in that case, she found it so easy to use twenty-first century phones.) In the bathroom of their London home, Ben has posted a montage of photographs of his and Christine’s life together. In the kitchen, he’s written helpful instructions to get her through the day once he’s gone to work – he’s a secondary school chemistry teacher. After Ben has left the house, Christine receives a daily phone call. The voice on the line says he is Dr Mike Nasch: he (re)introduces himself as a neuropsychologist who’s trying to help Christine regain memory, and asks her to keep a video diary that will serve as a reminder of who she is. While Christine learns from Ben that her brain damage is the legacy of an accident, Dr Nasch tells her that she was the victim of a brutal attack and advises her not to tell Ben about the video diary. Nasch (Mark Strong) has unconventional and clandestine meetings with his patient, in his car.
This adaptation of S J Watson’s highly successful novel (Rowan Joffe also did the screenplay) is a fairly entertaining psychological thriller although its tone is unvarying. The film would be more unsettling with less of Edward Shearmur’s standard issue ominous music, which has a protective, only-a-movie effect. The bleak, disorienting images constructed by Rowan Joffe and his cinematographer Ben Davis, along with the flashback splinters that invade Christine’s nightmares and waking life, reflect rather too neatly her fractured state of mind. I’ve not read Watson’s book but I know it’s a first person narrative, the storyteller is Christine and the reader must therefore rely on her word to an extent that a film audience doesn’t need to do. The viewer can decide whether Christine should trust Ben or Dr Nasch or neither of them. In a story centred on the uncertainty of identity, his admirers might argue that Colin Firth, in making Ben unconvincing, is doing something very skilful but I’m not persuaded. One has seen Firth’s trademark quiet melancholy too often to be fooled – it’s the actor, not the character, who’s trying and failing to avoid being dully inauthentic. The proof of this arrives when Ben is revealed to be an impostor: Firth is just as hollow as the man Ben turns out really to be. Firth’s only believable moment comes when the Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ is playing on a radio in the kitchen and Ben sings along.
Mike Nasch seems suspicious in several ways: for a start, he not only works at University College London (or so he tells Christine) but drives a car with a number plate that ends in ‘UCL’! But Mark Strong’s playing of Nasch is a first-rate demonstration of keeping the viewer guessing the truth about a character in a thriller; with his great combination of warmth and potential menace, Strong achieves this without ever forcing a look or a line reading. Nicole Kidman, required to be emotionally in extremis almost continuously, is well cast as the weird, kinetically anxious Christine. Kidman is highly accomplished, if rarely surprising. With Anne Marie Duff, who does well with her largely expository lines as Christine’s friend Claire, and Adam Levy, who makes a last-minute and, in the happy-ish ending circumstances, oddly spooky appearance as Christine’s real husband.
9 September 2014