BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP

Certificate 15.

92 mins.

Thriller/Romance/Action.

Starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Anne-Marie Duff.

FOLLOWING a car accident, 47-year-old Christine Lucas (Nicole Kidman) is diagnosed with anterograde amnesia.

Each morning, she wakes in a strange bed next to a man she does not know and creeps into the adjacent bathroom where a series of photographs on the wall begin to fill in the blanks, letting her know that the man is her husband Ben (Colin Firth) and they have shared many happy years together.

“You store up information for a day, wake up, and it’s all gone,” explains Ben, whose love for his wife holds strong.

He leaves for work and Christine receives a mysterious telephone call from someone called Dr Nash (Mark Strong), who instructs her to look in the wardrobe.

“We’ve been keeping a video diary. I’m not sure Ben knows,” confides the medic.

The subsequent footage casts doubt on the facts that underpin Christine’s fragile existence.

Based on SJ Watson’s bestselling novel, Before I Go To Sleep is an ingenious thriller, which drip-feeds us fragmented flashbacks, clouding our judgement of characters as they orbit Christine, purportedly out of love.

We’re placed in exactly the same hellish predicament as the heroine, absorbing scraps of information from supposedly reliable sources, unsure if writer-director Rowan Joffe is leading us a merry, sadistic dance.

Kidman captures the fragility of a woman at the mercy of her condition, who knows she must stare into the abyss before sleep robs her of a day’s detective work.

Firth and Strong offer sterling support and Joffe cranks up the tension with each hairpin twist, which lose some of their gasp-inducing impact on a second viewing.