There’s something fiendish about the way Jason Yu’s film Sleep (original Korean title: 잠 [Jam]) operates. A strong case is built for untoward and spooky goings-on, but the staggering amount of ambiguity Yu builds into his script and visuals asks a little more of us than expecting easily resolved conflict. The meat of Sleep is found in its characters and ambiance creating a stylish tension, hooking us early on and keeping us in thrall as the mystery surrounding a strange haunting unfolds.
Sleep is a low-key thriller that pushes a relatable humanity to the fore, dispensing with visual effects and other trickery while maintaining a strict focus on our hero couple, Hyeon-soo (Lee Sun-kyun in one of his final performances) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi). Lee and Jung fill their roles with caring support that puts us on their side immediately. It’s not just gender roles at play here; the kindness and love they carry for each other makes this film easy to spring forward into the horror that awaits them.
We see a small glimpse of how Yu operates in the prologue, as pregnant Soo-jin awakens to find Hyeon-soo sitting on the edge of their bed and sleep-droning about something being “inside.” When Soo-jin goes out into the dark recesses of their apartment to investigate, Yu slow-burns the reveals he’s set up to raise our hackles and plants us on a precarious is-it-or-isn’t-it razor’s edge he hones sharply throughout. The film absolutely lives in this kind of long setup, but the payoffs become much more devastating as Soo-jin makes further discoveries about what’s happening to Hyeon-soo at night.
Yu keeps us bewildered as to why Hyeon-soo is suddenly affected while he’s sleeping, escalating us rapidly from merely walking and talking in his sleep to actions capable of turning even the strongest of stomachs. (Dog lovers, you will be upset with this movie. Watch at your own risk.) His work as an actor is impeded by something he does while he’s sleeping, so his role as breadwinner is severely impacted, leaving his wife to keep them going with her paycheck. Her pregnancy (and subsequent delivery) adds another factor of dread in not knowing if Hyeon-soo will harm the baby or Soo-jin while he’s sleeping.
Without needing excessive gore or ostentatious jump scares, Yu packs Sleep full of tension and doesn’t stop raising the stakes. There are no moments of respite once the film rolls its opening title card; each sequence paints another coat of danger on top of the one before it, progressing from innocent itching to finding blood trails on the kitchen floor to Hyeon-soo unexpectedly throwing himself out a window. By establishing the couple’s us-against-the-world nature early, we know they’re in for a fight, but these nighttime occurrences are fast wearing them both thin, not knowing if they have any of themselves left to give. This theme of going the distance for one another takes them to extremes, ranging from bunking down in a cocoon-like sleeping bag in Hyeon-soo’s car to resorting to mystic protections.
The film posits that there’s an unquiet spirit possessing Hyeon-soo while he sleeps, but Yu also dangles deep-seated insecurity in front of us to possibly throw us off this track. Both of the film’s main characters are briefly shown to be competent at their jobs but confide in each other about not being good enough. While it’s easy to believe that Hyeon-soo is being taken over at night, it’s also entirely possible that he’s subconsciously acting out, unhappy with his life and the threat of a baby shackling him to it. Although we don’t see anything of his life outside of the apartment they share or without Soo-jin’s presence, several turns taken at the end might push us into asking if there’s something more to what we see. Yu has written Hyeon-soo to be an award-winning actor, so it’s not much of a leap to surmise that this might be his form of pushing her away.
Jung Yu-mi does terrific work, steeping the harried Soo-jin in alternating swaths of concern, confusion, happiness, and near-madness while trying to figure out these rising calamities plaguing them. The siege upon her husband’s body and soul and her own self backs Soo-jin into dark places as she tries to destroy the ghost’s grip upon her family, and Jung commits fully to the script as the only witness to Hyeon-soo’s transformation. Likewise, Lee Sun-kyun plays Hyeon-soo with subtle skill, emoting a figure battered by a war raging between internal and external forces. Previously seen in the action-thriller A Hard Day and Bong Joon-ho’s landmark Parasite, Lee adds another note-perfect portrayal to his sadly curtailed body of work with a performance that doesn’t just ask us to believe in him; rather, he invites us into the character’s shoes and lets us (sleep)walk with him at our own peril.
There aren’t any computer effects Jason Yu uses to tell his tale; instead, he relies on the power of his own story and direction and the actors telling it. It’s nowhere near a gamble, as Yu shows the utmost confidence in Jung Yu-mi and Lee Sun-kyun’s collective ability to carry this story to its cryptic end. Even though we may have questions, we are satisfied… and super-unnerved. Yu works solely in the corporeal, cutting the extraneous and superficial to show things as they are, and it’s a thrilling experience from start to finish. Those who seek it out will be utterly chilled by this freaky little suspense film that doesn’t let up, not even when its final frame cuts to black.
