EXCLUSIVE
SLEEP The South Korean mystery thriller that’s keeping everyone up at night…
Ihave some nasty sleeping habits that torment my wife,’ confesses South Korean writer/director Jason Yu with a guilty grin. ‘I snore very loudly and I have sleep apnoea – I stop breathing for long periods of time. I guess, subconsciously, I’ve wondered, “What would happen if the level of these symptoms gradually grow more threatening?”’
It was Yu’s turbulent sleep patterns, along with his dark fascination for the kind of sleepwalking accidents you sometimes hear of in the news (‘Somebody jumping off a building, or harming a loved one’) that shaped the decidedly creepy plot of Sleep. Set largely in a single apartment, it sees the loving marriage of Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) put under strain when Hyun-su’s sleepwalking (and talking) escalates to scary extremes. Nothing is able to stop it – not a tightly corded sleeping bag, or a bolt on the bedroom door – and soon the pregnant Soo-jin feels endangered.
An assistant director on Bong Joon-ho’s giant-pig movie Okja, Yu says he learned everything he knows from the Korean master behind such exemplary chillers as Memories of Murder and Parasite. It was Bong’s long, deep shadow that loomed over Yu as he refashioned his first-draft script from a found-footage horror movie with baby cams into something more unusual and interesting, and as he drew up storyboards and adhered to them while shooting on a tight schedule and budget in a contained space.
