Review for RAF News July 2024

A professional actor and his pregnant wife are safe-proofing the house and changing their lifestyle – not just preparing their home for the baby on the way, but fortifying against something far more sinister that haunts their nights.

Sleep, the Korean horror debut of Jason Yu, opens appropriately with the sound of deep, guttural snoring. The culprit is Hyun-su (the late Lee Sun-kyun), an Oscar winner who now sits bolt up right at end of the bed muttering that “someone is inside”, panicking wife Soo-Jin (Jung Yu-mi) to high alert before he cosily returns to sleep. 

There is a deft mix of dark humour and creeping dread, that eases the tension with perfectly timed comic relief, especially as Hyun-su’s nighttime escapades become more unpredictable and violent: one scratching fit early on leaves gashes in his face. When he starts to sleepwalk and roam about the apartment, they begin to fear for the safety of Pepper, their little Pomeranian, as well as the unborn baby.

An executive by profession, Soo-Jin is a pragmatist and so she waves off her mother’s spiritual notions and instead meets every potential hazard with a solution, beginning with a trip to the sleep clinic. Here they will learn that Hyun-su’s nocturnal activities are all symptoms of a stress induced sleep disorder, but the question is whether they can help before he does anything drastic.

Sleekly made with a style that complements its suspenseful turns and moments of gore, Sleep sets its story up neatly and commits to its level of escalation. A fun and sometimes wince inducing horror that does a great job of treading the line between heightened reality and the supernatural.