This movie is a good example of how you don’t need a lot of special effects and convolution to make a good horror film. Just a simple story told well.
Sleep begins like a classic spooky story. A woman wakes to find her husband sat bolt upright at the end of the bed. “Someone’s inside,” he says. When she reaches for him, he falls back, dead asleep.
What follows is a straightforward three-act plot of domestic bliss descending to horror. The first act is about the wife witnessing the husband’s increasingly disturbing and dangerous night-time activities. The second is of the wife’s growing paranoia and unravelling mental state as she stays awake to protect herself and their newborn daughter from the sinister figure of her husband. And finally the climax.
The characters are almost archetypal as the young, happy, married couple expecting their first child. The plot is a classic ghost story. Yet it is not boring or predictable. It is tense, claustrophobic, and deeply unsettling.
I listened to the audience’s gasps, heard myself mutter, “Jesus!”, and jumped in my seat more than once. I would not recommend watching before bed. Not because of any gore or extremes of violence, but for how it just keys into those evergreen anxieties, of sleeping completely vulnerable and helpless next to your partner, of the unknowable, unpredictable nature of the human beings we keep close, and of the fragility of the bonds we build our lives on. With little visual nods to Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, and Poltergeist, Sleep is an excellent addition to the catalogue of domestic horror.