Jason Yu’s “Sleep” is a sharp and tight and purposeful modern thriller. That cannot be taken for granted in the age of the 140-minute popcorn movie with a plot that could be written on a saltine. A trim 93 minutes, “Sleep” runs so fast that its emotional reverberations might not announce themselves until later.
Admittedly, the film is so lean that it feels a mite impersonal. We only learn what we need to know in order for the plot to move forward. The characterizations are so minimal that I found myself forgetting what one of the protagonists even does for a living. But leanness is strength here, at least initially. Within five minutes, Yu has hooked the audience with his ingeniously simple premise.
Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a married couple with a baby on the way and a cute Pomeranian named Pepper on hand to, in the tradition of dogs in horror movies, keep the audience uneasy with anticipation as to what might happen to it. As befitting young couples, especially one in which the husband is an aspiring actor, their apartment is homey yet small, which also works in the film’s favor. Yu allows you to feel as if you can see every nook of their apartment at all times, which invests “Sleep” with a quiet kind of relentlessness. When things go wrong, there’s no escape.
Things go wrong immediately, though Soo-jin and Hyun-su underestimate the scale of what’s about to besiege them. Hyun-su starts to sleepwalk nightly. The first time he does so, which is during the first scene of the film, he claims in his sleep that someone is inside. We’ve heard this sort of stuff in movies before, but the immediacy and unceremonious-ness of the portent is chilling. Yu masterfully exploits small anxieties. Something is quite creepy about a man eating from the refrigerator in his sleep, especially when he’s eating raw meat and eggs, including the shells.
The film is told from Soo-jin’s point of view as she comes to see her husband as a fount of potential disasters. Hyun-su almost jumps out of their apartment window. A calamity inevitably befalls Pepper. He violently scratches his own face. These disturbances point towards the growing elephant in the room: What’s he going to do with the baby when it’s born? The pared-down simplicity of Yu’s staging and plotting during the first half of “Sleep” really is quite impressive. There is nothing to distract Soo-jin, or us, from the immediate problem of Hyun-su’s terrifying new sleep habits. Yu keeps tugging you along with little incidents from the land of the rational towards a more sinister realm.
In the right hands, few things are scarier than a traditional, banal domestic scene that’s been given a shrewd and subtle tilt towards perversity. Such scenes suggest the chaos that’s right under the surface of everyday life, and “Rosemary’s Baby” is still the champion of this kind of insinuating horror. It’s a film that manages to make a scene of a young woman eating her neighbor’s chocolate mousse positively tingle with unease. Hyun-su’s gorging on raw red meat is of course a tribute to this classic, a nod from a rising filmmaker toward a benchmark of the kind of horror he’s attempting.
The plot of “Sleep” reveals itself to be more in sync with “Rosemary’s Baby” than you might initially expect. Supernatural possibilities are debated, a woman’s body is coveted by elders, and neighbors are not what they appear to be. Both films pivot on the notion of a pregnancy isolating a prospective mother from her husband, who can’t understand her situation and who might in fact be actively conspiring to harm her and their child.
Yu tilts the subtext a bit. If “Rosemary’s Baby” is often considered in terms of feminist and generational conflicts between Boomers and their parents, “Sleep” is more invested in the practical details of a woman adjusting to her husband’s relentless sickness. In this vein, “Sleep” suggests a parable of a relationship splintered by addiction. This couple begins to sleep separately, live separately, all while man and wife respectively tell themselves that the problem will be fixed soon with a different approach. As someone who almost lost a relationship to alcohol before hanging up the bottle, I found some of the details of this couple’s isolation and resignation to be unsettlingly familiar.
As in most horror films, the explanation behind the family’s ordeal is less scary than the seeming randomness that precedes it. This is another trick that “Rosemary’s Baby” managed: the explanation for what was going on there, a full validation of a young woman’s paranoia, made the movie scarier and more mysterious. That’s a difficult trick to pull off—there’s a reason, after all, that we’re talking about “Rosemary’s Baby” over half a century after its release. Yu never betrays his film, but the explanation for the sleepwalking and an unexpected realignment of the audience’s sympathies don’t quite land. This is a case of the film’s efficiency working against it; these strands might have been more convincing if they have been allowed to breathe.
Yu is also to a degree playing it safe with “Sleep,” which continually alludes to the stranger and sicker film that it could have been. Once the film veers into the supernatural, its best hook—the uncanny qualities of sleepwalking and the vulnerabilities they embody in this marriage—is nearly forgotten. And there is plenty more meat on that bone, should Yu have chewed it. A husband who might be capable of doing anything to his wife is scarier than a shaman carrying on about horny ghosts.
Whatever else can be said of Pascal Plante’s “Red Rooms,” it cannot be accused of avoiding the nasty particulars of its premise. Unlike “Sleep,” this movie isn’t meant to be fun, the cinematic equivalent of a page-turner. This one is slow, hypnotic, disturbing, and masterfully directed. Until its ending, which leaves more hope than I might have liked (though not much), “Red Rooms” wants to bother you.
Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is a successful model obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is not only accused of killing several teenage girls, but torturing and dismembering them. These acts were filmed for sale and exhibition to “red rooms,” places on the dark web where the disturbed can consume such product. Kelly-Anne, who has a hacker’s finesse with the online world, attends the trial daily and meets another Chevalier groupie, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who maintains that he is innocent. Kelly-Anne, virtually unreadable, doesn’t require such justification. She longs to be a part of this story, and the victims look eerily like her.
The first half of “Red Rooms” is more or less a courtroom procedural told from the unusual vantage point of the audience on the sidelines. There is a spellbinding tracking shot in which Plante gradually circles the courtroom and establishes all of the players and particulars of the case in a matter of minutes. The long takes in this film aren’t superficial fireworks; they lull you, inviting you into the lurid story and onto Kelly-Anne’s wavelength. Kelly-Anne is cold, ruthlessly intelligent and competent, and these qualities only bring us closer to her. We are as mystified by the depths of her potential sickness as we are by the scale of depravity driving the murder trial.
Having a true-crime obsessive with a disturbingly advanced command of online arcana turn out to be an attractive and successful woman is a nice touch. If she were an overweight middle-aged male virgin with dolls and posters in the background of his office, we would probably be more comfortable here. We might write the character off with a smug “of course.” But Kelly-Anne’s status challenges our stereotypical assumptions about people with interests that verge on the depraved. Sickness is democratic, and Gariépy’s haunting performance refuses to sentimentalize.
“Red Rooms” becomes more figurative as it progresses towards its heart of darkness, more invested in Kelly-Anne’s psyche as she alienates Clémentine, a nice kid who’s basically a tourist looking for kicks, and drifts deeper into the dark web, potentially finding the video of the final girl’s murder. These killings clearly represent some sort of sexual thrill for Kelly-Anne, and “Red Rooms” becomes a movie that questions the role that consumers have in what they consume.
Is she enabling murder, albeit retrospectively? If no one wanted to watch these theaters of carnage, would Chevalier have produced them? (Probably.) And how vast is the distance between Kelly-Anne’s sick consumption and the way that we gorge on true-crime docs and continually numb ourselves with techno-media? If footage of a real murder was emailed to you, would you open it up? Could you back away from the abyss?
“Sleep” and “Red Rooms” are now on VOD.
