Sucks. Maybe “sucks” is too strong a word, but unlike “Men, Women, Children” this film does deserve its rotten tomatoes rating and weak box office performance.
What Works: It’s about an amnesiac woman (Nicole Kidman) who wakes up everyday with no memory, but her husband (Colin Firth) and psychiatrist (Mark Strong) both want to help her. This premise could have been teased out to provide a sleek Hitchcockian thriller, but instead…
What Doesn’t: …it alternates between sleepy and ridiculous. The film is only 92 minutes but it feels a lot longer than that because of the overly sedate first hour. For far too long, “Before I Go to Sleep” feels like an unnecessarily upscale, white-wine version of “Memento” and I began to feel my attention drift. It never really plugs us into the anxiety that Kidman’s character must feel to be told—over and over—that she’s waking up to a life she doesn’t know and either of the only two people in her life might not be trustworthy narrators.
Plus, with only two other substantial characters in the film, it really limits the options of what could be “amiss” in Kidman’s world. Once we finally get to the big twist, the whole narrative of what we’ve seen before it falls apart completely. When you start to really think about it, there are plot holes big enough to swallow our solar system, and “implausible” and/or “stupid” isn’t how I like my movie twists.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I know this is based on a book—-that I haven’t read and might be terrific for all I know—-so I’m not sure how much of what happens is in the book or if it made more sense there. Regardless, they could have added more visual panic and a jittery editing style to mimic something of the anxiety and dread the main character must be feeling…the film’s overly tony visual language screams “Mercedes commercial” more than “panic-filled existence.”