Before I Go To Sleep

Before I Go To Sleep

Rating: 1.75/5

Premise:

A 40 year old woman wakes up every day not remembering her life for the past 14 years. The movie explores Christine trying to figure out what happened and who she can trust.

Review:

When I first heard about this movie I thought hmm… Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman and such a premise? A must-watch, if there ever was one.

However, it was a major disappointment for me.
I found it extremely slow placed, with long silences which added nothing to the story, in my opinion, and only caused me to drift away.
It is repetitive, which you should expect to some extent, given it’s about a woman who has to have the same things explained to her every single day but, again, caused me to get distracted much too frequently. There are ways to do this without causing extreme boredom to the viewer, as you can see in other movies with similar premises.
For a long time, not much seems to happen and then everything unravels in the last moment.
But mostly there were huge plot flaws.

The biggest ones I identified and can still remember were:

– Where were Christine’s friends and especially her family during all the time since the ‘accident’ ocurred?
– Why did no one seem to notice when she was taken from the adult care facility? Only Claire is mentioned to have tried to contact her but didn’t do much to try and follow up on her!
– How could she not notice that the pictures had been doctored? Seriously?? And speaking of which, tampering with a few pictures is one thing, but a whole photo album? A birth certificate? How??
– She has been in that state for over a decade. Why start remembering things then?
– The hotel. How on earth could no one hear her screaming or running away all bloody, both times?
– Using a Nokia 3310, which looked brand new by the way, in 2013 was beyond convenient. Just so she could not activate the GPS function so Claire or anyone else could find her.
– Something else that was entirely too convenient was the doctor and the bad guy having the same first name.
– How exactly did the doctor find out about her? And randomly finding her in a park? Did I mention convenient?
– The complete isolation was not the least bit believable in an urban environment. Where are the neighbours? Joggers? Dog walkers? When does she go out for shopping, even if only groceries, etc? And when she goes to the school, does everyone know that guy as ‘Ben’?

One positive point is Firth’s performance, though he only really shines towards the end.
Given what we find out, I can not even understand the whole mind reset during the night thing. There was never a scientific explanation.

The movie succeeds in having a few suspenseful moments, but as a story about memory loss it is simply not believable and does not deliver.