Sunday Review: Before I Go to Sleep

You need to lose it before you watch this movie^*

By Morris Dean

During lunch yesterday, I said to my wife, "I think I'll review that movie we watched last night."
    "What movie was that? I can't remember it."
    "The one with Colin Firth. And Nicole Kidman and Mark Strong."
    "Oh, right! Ha, and I even woke up this morning thinking about that movie."
    Funny that she should have said that. In Before I Go to Sleep (2014, directed by Rowan Joffe), the Nicole Kidman character wakes up every morning not remembering anything of the previous day, wondering who is the man lying beside her in bed (the Colin Firth character), and being told by him that he's her husband. He shows her a wall of annotated photos of their life together and a schedule of their routine. Whenever she asks why she can't remember, he tells her that she had an accident ten years ago and suffered severe injuries to her head.

    Recently a psychotherapist (Mark Strong) has been trying to help her recover her memory, and one of the things he has suggested is that she use a camera to record herself recounting each day's events, to help her "remember" an accumulation of recent days. Each day now, after her husband has left for work, she receives a call from the therapist, who tells her who he is, reminds her that there's a camera in a shoebox in the closet, and tells her to look at the movies she has recorded on there.

    In the course of a couple of weeks some questions arise, and their answers start to reveal that there are a number of things about her past that aren't quite the way she has been told.
    The blurb on the box containing the DVD from the local library promises that "this tense thriller...features a shocking twist ending you will never see coming."

"What did you wake up thinking about the movie?" I asked my wife.

Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in
Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice (1995)

    "Well, we suspect that there's something not quite right about the therapist, and we are suspicious about the Nicole Kidman character's long-lost girlfriend who surfaces. But we never suspect the husband, because we just can't suspect Mr. Darcy. Now, if Mark Strong played the husband and Colin Firth played the therapist, it may have been possible to figure out what was going on."
    Being completely surprised by that twist – the blurb on the box was right – left a bad taste in our mouths, so that, despite being riveted through about 3/4 of the movie, we ended up not really liking it.
    I know that I've possibly spoiled your virginity regarding this movie, but I think you need to have lost it in order to get off on Before I Go to Sleep.
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* The famous movie reviewer Pauline Kael published a collection of her reviews titled I Lost It at the Movies.

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean