Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, and we’re re-publishing it with the film’s wider release. Check out our extensive review slate of TIFF 2023, revisit our official preview and complete archives of prior editions.
In the era of elevated horror, in which motherfuckers toss out signifiers and expect you to understand what they signify even if they don’t make a lick of sense, Jason Yu’s Sleep is the kind of no-bullshit, breezy horror film of which the world needs more. First off, this is a 90-minute horror film that dispenses with establishing its plot within a matter of minutes: Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), a businesswoman, and her actor husband, Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), are gearing up for a big addition to their lives: the arrival of their first child. They live in a small Seoul apartment with an absolutely adorable Pomeranian named Pepper, and they’re full of that kind of joyous anxiety that comes with such a milestone. But, right at the film’s start, Soo-Jin is roused from her sleep by a thud and sees her husband sitting at the end of the bed, staring into the distance. He mutters, “Something is inside,” pauses, and immediately falls back into position, snoring, sawing logs like timber in Northern Canada. They both write it off as a weird sleep phenomenon – it’s even close to one of his lines of dialogue in the TV show he’s currently filming – and try not to think too much of it.
Oh, what a mistake this proves to be. The next night, Hyun-su starts scratching his face in his sleep and can’t seem to stop. Soo-jin does what she can and eventually gets him to stop, but when they wake in the morning, Hyun-su has deep gashes in his cheek. The behavior only gets weirder with each passing night: one evening, he raids the fridge and chows down on a meal of raw beef and fish straight from the packaging, and the next night, he nearly falls out of the window. If you’re worried about the dog, well, you should be (and as the keeper of a similar-looking Pom, it is thankfully not as graphic as you might expect). Anyhow, they both assume that it’s some sort of sleep disorder, and their doctor agrees with them. But Soo-jin’s mother suspects a different cause – possession – and even though Soo-jin thinks the old bag is short a few marbles, she can’t help but suspect that something supernatural might be going on. And, worse, they’ll soon have their newborn son to worry about.
Yu worked under the likes of Lee Chang-dong and Bong Joon-ho over the course of his career, but his style isn’t particularly indebted or wed to one specific style. Sure, one can feel Bong’s influence on some of the humor – part of Sleep’s breeziness comes from its genuinely endearing banter between husband and wife – but Yu’s style is somewhat reminiscent of a restrained Sam Raimi, provided he were ever to make a romantic comedy about enduring relationship havoc around the birth of a child. This is a film in which pure-hearted and loving people are pushed by various paranormal ends to do decently terrible things that they’re only cognizant of sometimes, with a ton of the horror coming from watching these people give into the situation that they’ve been placed in (though it is also just pretty fucking scary, because damn, this movie is loud).
When the inevitable descent into madness occurs, they’re more rooted in a given character’s actions rather than their dialogue, and the film has a dynamic sensibility about it. Don’t confuse Yu’s fleet-footed cheer to be weightless, as the end product is surprisingly impactful, even if its final conclusions ultimately prove to be a little too sincere and silly when it arrives at its final twists and turns. Yet that’s part of the charm: Love conquering the supernatural, no matter how many poor Pomeranians it might claim along the way.