There’s not the same nuance here that she displayed in, say, The Others or Birth, roles which are in the same roomy wheelhouse as this one, but then again despite the fact that she’s the story’s anchoring consciousness the script doesn’t flesh actually out her character all that much.Īs his last feature, Brighton Rock, proved, Joffe has something of a knack from coaxing bad performances from usually good actors. That said, the film isn’t a massive repertoire-stretch for Kidman who has played this sort of vulnerable woman-on-the-edge many times before. Here, however, he shows off a dark side that’s shocking even for viewers who have read the book already. It works especially well with Firth, who in the semiotics of British cinema especially is the very apogee of cuddly male rectitude and moral probity. Okay, now, that they’ve gone, it can be said that one of the film’s minor virtues is how it plays with casting, exploiting expectations audiences have around actors like Strong and Firth. This is the sort of film where it’s difficult to discuss the performances without giving away the big twists, so those super sensitive to anything that’s faintly spoiler-ish should stop reading now. After all, he favors the use of a creepy, leaky car park he seems to have a permanent two-day stubble and, worst of all, he’s played by Mark Strong, a bad guy in so many films (see, for instance, Kick-Ass, or Zero Dark Thirty, or John Carter… the list is long.) Nasch, but while she may think he’s the swoony savior sort, viewers trained in genre conventions will feel they’re being prodded to be more suspicious. Meanwhile, she finds herself attracted to Dr. Ben insists that Claire moved abroad after the accident, but it turns she’s still very much still within commuting distance and keen to see her old buddy.Ĭhristine catches up on what she’s learned from the diary each day, and starts to twig that Ben is not the gentle, doting husband he seems to be. Nasch shows her a picture he found in her medical file. Also, Christine learns she had a very close friend named Claire ( Anne-Marie Duff), whom she starts to remember when Dr. For a start, it wasn’t an accident that caused her amnesia, but a brutal violent attack from an unknown assailant, flash-cut memories of which start to emerge as the days go on. It turns out there’s quite a lot that Ben hasn’t been telling Christine. He instructs her on where to find a camera in her closet on which she’s recorded a video diary over the last two weeks, prompting an extended flashback to illustrate what she’s learned so far. Nasch ( Mark Strong) explains to Christine that he’s a neuropsychologist who’s been helping with her memory disorder. When Ben goes off to work (he teaches high school), the phone rings and a man calling himself Dr. With a weary patience that suggests he’s explained the situation many times before, the man in the bed reveals that he is Christine’s husband Ben, and that she had an accident which caused her amnesia. 5 and then Stateside in October, this should generate fairly sweet box-office dreams in relation to its budget, but is unlikely to gain awards traction for either lead. Watson’s bestseller honors the lurid spirit of the page-turner enough to satisfy fans, but he doesn’t transmute the material into something richer and deeper the way, say, Alfred Hitchcock could, despite the film’s many Hitchcockian nods. Writer-director Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Reteamed once again with Colin Firth, her co-star in The Railway Man, Nicole Kidman stars as an amnesia victim whose brain resets back to 13 years ago after each night’s slumber in the decidedly average psychological thriller Before I Go to Sleep.
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