Before I Go To Sleep

Based on the bestselling 2011 debut thriller by SJ Watson, Before I Go To Sleep has a fantastically taut premise.

Nicole Kidman plays a woman waking up next to an unfamiliar man (Colin Firth) with no idea who she is, or why she is there. She panics and hides in his bathroom until she learns that she is Christine Lucas, the man is her husband Ben, and owing to injuries sustained in a car crash, her memory is wiped clean each night.

Firth’s face is a picture in this opening scene. You wonder why he touches Christine when she’s so vulnerable, then his face crinkles and you see all the moments of hurt caused by having to constantly explain his life with her.

The picture smudges as soon as Ben leaves for work and Christine answers the phone to a man claiming to be Dr Nash, a psychiatrist who has been working with Christine for months. It’s somewhat concerning that Dr Nash is played by the impossibly smooth Mark Strong, a regular contributor to Hollywood’s Evil British Man stereotype, but he helps Christine to locate a hidden digital camera, on which she has recorded what she has learned each day.

When her memory starts to reveal snippets, including a forgotten friend, Claire (Anne- Marie Duff), Christine discovers that the circumstances of her accident may be much murkier than she thought.

Before I Go To Sleep doesn’t so much twist and turn as knit a tapestry of confusion. Firth and Strong are brilliantly cast, popping in and out of your sympathies until, like Christine, you have absolutely no idea who to trust. And when you do decide to finally trust someone completely, that trust is violently betrayed. Terrific stuff.

And yet… and yet. Nicole Kidman is a wonderful actress and has proven any number of times that she can do excellent, subtle work in thrillers. Sadly, little of that gets shown here. Kidman’s Christine wavers between histrionics and Madonna levels of breathiness, which, coupled with the most unplaceable English accent this side of British Accents For Dummies, makes her more like a doll in a pastiche of a thriller than a real character.

Some distracting production decisions don’t help, and some scenes border on the ridiculous. Moreover, I couldn’t get over Christine’s hair, a lavish blowdry with a fringe. Who tends to this ridiculously highmaintenance confection? Christine is living a nightmare; there’s no time for trips to the salon, or playing around with kitchen scissors.

It sounds silly, but it all adds up to the fact that Christine never feels like a real person, and in a film where she is your only anchor in reality, that is a serious flaw. But if you’re a better person than me and don’t get niggled by detail, then Firth and Strong are a formidable pair worth watching. I am looking forward to settling in with the book instead.