Before I Go To Sleep

50 First Dates Gone Seriously Wrong

Director: Rowan Joffe
Release Date: 2014
Rating: 15
Running Time: 90mins
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong

"As I sleep tonight my mind will erase everything I knew today"

One of the main things I'd always hope to see in cinemas are films with good twists. Though you should never ideally expect them to appear when watching a film, there's no denying that if you know there's a good one, you'll want to see the film. What I've found is that audiences either love to be tricked, or love to be able to guess endings and avoid the tricks that films can play. Either way, they can be great fun. So when I first saw the trailer for Before I Go To Sleep, everything about it screamed "twist", and one that would keep you guessing at that.

Christine Lucas (Kidman) is an amnesiac waking everyday with no memory of what had happened the night before, not knowing who or what she can trust, even herself for that matter. As she tries to peice together the incidents leading up to her memory loss, she realises that each person around her begins to hold a potential threat to her. No one will know who to trust. She is faced with the dilemma of who she can really rely on, the estranged man she wakes up to everyday who she is married to (Firth), or the man who calls her everyday claiming to be a psychiatrist wanting to help recover her memory (Strong). Both of whom she has absolutely no recollection of causing her to be unsure of whether she can trust either of them.

In a way, without our memories then we aren't really anything. It's our memories that make us the people that we are. Everything we do has a reaction that can shape our personalities. For Christine, we're shown how life can become unbearable to live, if the people closest to us are strangers. For the audience watching, we ourselves can't even work out who is trustworthy and who isn't and when you think one thing, it's probably the opposite. The way Before I Go To Sleep is written is actually very clever. On the outside it's a seemingly peaceful life, an ideal husband and beautiful house. But inside, she's plagued by fear that her history is being written for her instead of by her, and as she learns more about her feared past she realises how much danger she's actually in. There's a real darkness embedded in the film that will straight away pull you in as you grow determined to find out what's really going on.

7/10