As a thriller, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP works well enough. We know that some sort of twist is coming, and it comes. It is probably predictable to someone who enjoys figuring these things out in advance. I don't. I like to go in to the movies like an innocent little child.
What I want to talk about is Nicole Kidman. She looks dead inside. Did she ask her plastic surgeon to make her look like one of the Olsen Twins? From some angles the illusion functions but from others her Botoxed and lifted face looks like a creepy mask. The skin on her hands looks cracked and withered...probably from shoving them down her throat every day to make herself vomit. She looks unhealthy and anorexic. Hollywood transforms humans into monsters.
Kidman is a perfect choice to play Christine precisely for this reason. Christine is a battered woman who prefers being beaten to remembering anything about who she is. Her amnesia is a metaphor for the loss of self to which abused women consent by remaining with their abusers. Her life is an endless present.
The emotional tonality of the film is flat and depressing without being dark or foreboding. Perhaps this is what it is like to be in an abusive relationship: no color, no variety, no other people, just empty days spent wandering through a hollow life punctuated with blows and hysterical fits.
What strikes me about so many films today is the total lack of engagement with Logos of any of the characters. No one in this film has a meaningful relationship with thought, knowledge, faith, reflection, science, philosophy, art, music or any other of the avatars of Logos that alone are capable of extracting us from our mortifying, fusional relationships with our family members. Is anyone else out there sick of the way that spouses and above all children are presented by Hollywood as the unique objects capable of giving meaning to life? I would have given this movie ten stars out of ten if Adam had turned out to be an ugly, disagreeable, pimply teenager who told his mother to go to hell, thereby destroying Christine's narcissistic illusion that she is an eternally beautiful perfect mother with a perfect husband and a perfect son, but of course he weeps with joy when she sings her stupid lullaby to him. Give us a break with this stuff. This stupid scene alone cost the movie a star in my super important rating that the producers will certainly take into account when making their next turkey.
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