‘Sleep’ Review: A Picturesque Family Is Woken by an Unseen Evil in Jason Lu’s Debut Horror Flick

Magnet Releasing

Sleeping sends our bodies into a state of regeneration that does not always correspond with our consciousness, amplifying the visceral senses experienced through dreams and nightmares in potent ways that we have all experienced at one point or another. The omnipotent influence of our sleep habits dictates nearly every function, an actuality that we typically do not consider until there is an issue with our patterns of rest. With his feature debut, Sleep, South Korean filmmaker Jason Yu probes the horror genre through sleep's simultaneously banal and essential significance. The film forms a chamber piece of terror that centers around a young family's struggles to hold together their conventional aspirations when an unseen evil begins to call upon them in the quietest hours of the night. 

Sleep stars the late Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite) and Jung Yu-Mi as Hyun-su and Soo-jin, young newlyweds with a baby on the way, looking to build their perfect vision of a traditional family, fluffy white dog and all. The couple lives in a high-rise apartment, where their respectable neighbors politely complain about hearing loud noises in the middle of the night. One evening, Soo-jin is jolted awake by a disturbance and turns over to listen to her husband mutter in his sleep, "Someone's inside." In the nights that follow, Soo-jin becomes a witness to Hyun-su's increasingly alarming nocturnal behavior, which doctors diagnose as a "stress-induced sleep disorder." 

The pair work with optimism to overcome Hyun-su's newfound troubles, swathing him in a sleeping bag at night and barring all the windows and doors with the hopes of controlling his sleepwalking, but when their child is born, Soo-jin's worries for the safety of her family after dark become all-consuming. Mentally fraying at the seams, Soo-jin starts to wonder if her husband's sleep disorder is being provoked by a more malevolent force. As the couple's pursuit of an ordinary family life slips out of their reach under the weight of Hyun-su's progressively violent nighttime patterns, the two go to intense lengths to uncover the insidious force infiltrating their peaceful home.

Magnet Releasing

Graduating from his work as an assistant director on Bong Joon-ho's Okja, Yu delivers a thoughtful and engaging debut with Sleep, which world premiered at 2023's Cannes Film Festival in the Critics' Week section. Working with a tight cast and just a handful of shooting locations, Sleep skirts the limitations of its modest scope to experiment and subvert genre elements in surprising ways. Spiritually akin to films like Rosemary's Baby and Insidious, Yu's script and direction effectively explore the horrors of a family under siege, the unease and terror brought forth when an unseen force attacks the home, a presumed sanctuary. With the help of a skilled team of creative collaborators, Yu transforms the apartment where much of Sleep takes place from a cozy haven to a red-drenched prison. Cinematographer Tae-soo Kim captures this through his ever-evolving camera work, which pursues the characters' descent into psychological suffering as Sleep moves forward.

Sleep is structured into three chapters, which works in its favor by building atmosphere and uncertainty as the audience is drawn deeper into its mystery. The performances of the film's central couple mirror that progression through the three parts, with the screenplay giving space for the audience to better understand the emotional perspectives of both Hyun-su and Soo-jin as their characters begin to unravel. Ultimately, the film's triptych shape is most effective in its first two segments: the final installment gets bogged down by spelling out too many of its secrets, which are faultlessly engrossing on their own.

Sleep's overall vision of supernatural horror with a spin communicates with unspoken social anxieties that may fracture traditional visions of family life in contemporary times. Yu often concentrates on the normality that Sleep's leading duo strives for, only to shatter these idealized routines with slivers of violence and horror that totally unhinge the characters from the conventionality they have always envisioned for their life together. This approach intriguingly plays with South Korea's social standards concerning the nuclear family. 

Magnet Releasing

With his first feature, Sleep, Yu delivers an unpretentious but pleasing work of horror that balances its familiarity with enough freshness to set it apart from other works of the genre. Nods to standard tropes intermix with a narrative that keeps audiences guessing, culminating with a movie that proves ultimately satisfying through its twisting mystery.

3.5/5

‘Sleep’ first premiered in 2023 as part of the Critic's Week selection at the Cannes Film Festival before screening in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is now playing in select theaters across the United States and is available on VOD, with distribution handled by Magnet Releasing. Click here for more information about ‘Sleep.’