Amnesia is the gift that keeps on giving for filmmakers, from 1945’s sublime Spellbound to the ridiculous but fun 50 First Dates of 2004 via a host of others including Guy Pearce’s 2000 Memento, a poster of which turned up on a teenage girl’s bedroom door in the recent French TV drama The Returned.
The latest director to have a go at tapping into this bounty is Rowan Joffe, whose BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP stars Nicole Kidman as Christine, the thirties something wife of a schoolteacher living in a London suburb.
The film begins with Christine waking up in bed beside a man (Colin Firth) and wondering where she is and who he is. The man calmly and patiently explains that he’s her husband Ben and that, following a car crash years earlier, her memory is erased every night when she goes to sleep. When she wakes up at the start of every day Christine has to piece her life together all over again.
This concept is easy to grasp yet Joffe feels the need to explain it over and over again in the film’s first 15 minutes, mainly through the device of daily phone calls from Christine’s shrink Dr Nasch, played by Mark Strong who gives a convincing portrayal as both a possible goody and a potential baddy in his “is he or he isn’t he?”performance.
This tedium eventually gathers pace a little when it comes to piecing together Christine’s past life, including the mysterious Claire (Anne-Marie Duff) and whether or not Christine is a mother.
Unfortunately, this part of the film also drags. There are only so many ways and so many times a filmmaker can show us flashbacks and Joffe has strange penchant for stringing scenes together by showing us close-ups of a single, rather bloodshot, eyeball belonging to Christine; as well as an irritating habit of cranking up suspense by involving her in jarring and sudden brushes with the means of a possible sticky end: a car! a truck! a plane!
The film does however jolt itself – and the audience – into life after one hour, but less than 30 minutes later it’s all over complete with a sickly sweet Hollywood happy ending.
Filmgoers in 2014 are very demanding when it comes to psychological thrillers and the lacklustre BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP seems likely to, like its central premise, become forgotten all too soon.
BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP opens on 16 October 2014.