Before I Go To Sleep – Movie Review

Before I Go To Sleep – R
Release Date: Fri 31 Oct 2014

Before I Go To Sleep puts Nicole Kidman into a role that is incredibly hard to pull off. As Christine, she plays an amnesiac who awakens every morning with no memory of the last twenty or so years of her life. She doesn’t realize she’s 40. She doesn’t recognize her husband. As an actress, this puts Kidman into troubling territory with the audience as she’s not experiencing the story in the same way we are. Her reactions don’t match ours. Your opinion of this movie will likely hang in the balance of how well you think she pulls this off or, as many others have said, her acting seems “bad” because her character growth is so stunted.

That’s not to say that the movie is a chore or a waste of time. After a while, an outsider gives her a camera to record a message to herself to listen to the next morning. This leads her to be more and more aware of what is happening as she tries to figure out what happened to her and caused the amnesia. Can she trust Ben (Colin Firth) who wakes up in her bed each morning to explain who and what she is? Can she trust her doctor who calls in every morning and tells her where to find the camera?

Kidman has been in similar films before (Stoker, The Others) and while I’ve enjoyed all of these movies at the time, they’re not ones I really need to revisit. This is a good way to pass the time at home some night, but not a particularly strong case for seeing on the big screen.

Aaron, Cal and I saw it in the theater and had a discussion afterward in the car: