Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

life is short,or at least busy in the modern world. I bought the DVD cheap months ago and finally watched. I expect most people have an idea of the plot from the trailers I am a bit of a Nicol Kidman fan and have enjoyed the films of the director. But I felt this was a bit of a dud. I was thrilled and I was not horrified. The film is not awful,just unimpressive.

Slow moving. It took too long to get going before I got interested. I almost turned it off.Maybe I would have liked this more if I had not already binge watched other movies all day. It wasn't what I expected, but it was all right. Others may like it.

This movie is a mystery thriller around a woman suffering from a rare amnesia condition due to a serious trauma and who, therefore, wakes up every day thinking she is twenty years old and not even remembering her marriage. The idea would be very interesting if it had been well developed by the script, but it didn't. As the film goes by, the villain becomes too obvious, as are the plot holes. One of the most obvious is the marriage of Christine (the name of the character, played by Nicole Kidman): if her condition of amnesia causes her to forget only the memories from a given moment of life forward, and if that moment happened when she was already married or, at least, the girlfriend of the one who would become her husband, how could she forget his face? This is just an example of a plot hole I discovered. I will not give more so I will not spoil the whole story. Kidman was OK but not amazing; Colin Firth starts slowly but improves with the film's advance; Mark Strong does a good supporting role but does not have room to do much.

Two highly successful films I hate are "Memento" and "Groundhog Day", for wildly different reasons, but both falling way short of what I consider a good film. The atrocious "Before I Go to Sleep" blends elements of both in a disastrous fashion.Even if this film were believable (it's not) or engrossing (far from it), its use of red herrings is unforgivable. Halfway through we have a fake scene pointing guilt at our heroine's empathetic doctor, and that's immediately revealed to be a false lead. Flashback structure is irrelevant to the story, and the resolution of the mysteries leads to a sickly sentimental finish.Actors of the caliber of Kidman & Firth are attracted to such slop by virtue of challenging roles -and the challenge unfortunately derives from these roles being unplayable. On most TV series, and in traditional Hollywood during the factory system, there is either a writers' table or conference or some mechanism to sound out before shooting begins the psychology of why characters do what they do, so that an audience can believe it. Certainly viewers are naturally gullible -that is part of what cinema relies upon, but apparently no one checked or double checked whether the premise of this stupid story could hold water when dropped on the viewer in the first few expository scenes. The more complicated a thriller is, the more difficult to avoid plot holes and contradictions- even the most successful recent thriller GONE GIRL was loaded with mistakes and poor script devices during the latter reels when the fabricated story unraveled and was replaced by "what really happened". But with lousy films like "Sleep" the most basic elements are utter rubbish, right from the git go.