Soo-jin and Hyeon-soo, newlyweds from South Korea, the former of whom is expecting a baby, have moved into a new apartment.
But he begins to suffer from increasingly worrying sleepwalking attacks, so much so that after giving birth, Soo-jin fears that her husband will harm the baby...
A film directed by an assistant of Bong Joon-Ho, from whom he also borrows “Parasite” actor Lee Sun-kyun (who died last December), “Sleep” begins as a comedy-drama about the difficulty of life as a couple, its joys, but also its inconveniences, before turning into a thriller, then downright fantasy.
Moreover, this is not necessarily the best part of the film, as the strings and the final explanation appear far-fetched.
A thriller worth watching
But for everything else, and in particular the couple's slow descent into hell due to eventful nights, the feature film, presented out of competition at the last Cannes Film Festival and which won the Grand Prize at the last Gérardmer international fantasy film festival , is worth the detour.
For this closed session which rarely strays far from the protagonists' apartment, two great actors were needed.
Jason Yu chose Jung Yu-mi, the pregnant survivor of the horror film "Last Train to Busan", for the female role, who here goes from the most blissful joy to worry, ending with terror.
Opposite her, Lee Sun-kyun plays the husband, an actor without stature who chases the cachet, whose attitude increasingly irritates his wife.
A composition which will unfortunately be the penultimate on screen of the South Korean, who died on December 27 in Seoul, at the age of 48, in what would be, according to the police, a suicide.
The man had been in turmoil for several weeks, accused of being a drug addict, pursued by the press and vilified on social networks.
The main actor is… dead
Unlike the character he plays in "Sleep", Lee Sun-kyun was among the most popular artists in his country, thanks to a filmography rich in around thirty titles since 2003. He had thus worked four times under the tutelage of the renowned Hong Sang-soo (“Night and day”, “Sunhi”), but it was above all his only film with Bong Joon-ho, which made him an international star.
He played Dong-ik, the father of a family as rich as he was contemptuous, whose house ended up welcoming an entire family of penniless margoulins in the excellent “Parasite” (2019), awarded 5 Oscars and a Palme d'Or. gold at Cannes and a César for best foreign film!
In “Sleep”, he inherits a double-sided role, nice husband and dad during the day, unpredictable and dangerous sleepwalker at night.
And he turns out to be as talented in one case as the other!
Editor's note:
4/5
“Sleep”,
South Korean thriller by Jason Yu, with Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun, Kim Keun-sun... (1h35)