What would you do if you woke up one day and the person sleeping next to you no longer felt like the same person before falling asleep? For Soo-jin (played by Jung Yu-mi), this outlandish scenario became a reality, and it quite literally turned her world upside down. In Jason Yu’s directorial debut film SLEEP, Soo-jin tries to save her husband Hyun-su (played by the late Lee Sun-kyun) and their marriage from an unusual sleep behavior disorder, or possibly something worse, by any means necessary.Â
The film starts off normally, giving viewers a glimpse into Soo-jin and Hyun-su’s happy married life. Soo-jin is pregnant, and the two live in a spacious apartment with their dog, Pepper. After seeing one normal day of peace, however, things quickly start to sour. Soon, the couple is faced with a hefty challenge to overcome together: Hyun-su’s diagnosis of a REM sleep behavior disorder that causes sleepwalking and harmful, erratic behavior when he goes to bed. This disorder turns what is supposed to be the safest, most comfortable space in a home — the bed and bedroom — into a never-ending nightmare.Â
The film is split into three parts: Chapter One, which focuses on Soo-jin’s fear as Hyun-su’s conditions worsen, Chapter Two, set after Soo-jin gives birth to their daughter Ha-yoon and hones in on Hyun-su’s fear as Soo-jin becomes overly cautious, and Chapter Three, in which everything comes together for a dramatic finish.
As Hyun-su’s condition seems to worsen with each passing day, Soo-jin becomes more paranoid and anxious. Despite the couple’s declining health and sanity, the love they share for their little family keeps them motivated to get through this rough patch. Hitting a breaking point when she realizes she can’t trust Hyun-su to be around their newborn daughter, Soo-jin begins looking for a solution outside of science. Her mother invites a shaman to their home, and through the shaman, Soo-jin learns that she herself has attracted a spirit that has attached itself to Hyun-su. Ever the skeptic, Hyun-su disregards the shaman and continues to rely on the medicine his doctor provided. Spiraling further, Hyun-su and Soo-jin eventually find themselves at a crossroads, and their decisions lead them down different paths that converge for a thrilling conclusion. Ahead of SLEEP‘s premiere, Asia Blooming spoke with director Yu regarding the movie, how it came to fruition, and more.
Thinking back on the film’s inception, screenplay writer and director Jason Yu reveals it was actually inspired by his own sleep apnea. “I have a severe case of sleep apnea, which means I forget to breathe while I’m sleeping,” he began. “It’s not the snoring that terrifies my wife or keeps my wife awake — it’s when I stop snoring and she wakes up and realizes that I’m not breathing. It terrifies her to no end, and to the extent that she can no longer sleep afterwards. Only in the morning, when I wake up, I realize that she had gone through this tormenting night. And as guilty as I felt about that, I was also very fascinated, and it made me imagine what if my sleeping habit was even more severe or even more threatening and scary? And I think that was the jumping off point for a possibility of a horror film about sleepwalking.”
Despite taking inspiration from his own condition, the sleep behavior disorder Hyun-su experiences is quite fictitious, though informed by research. “During the screenwriting phase, I did a lot of research, you know, on the internet and through documentaries, YouTube videos, research papers, etc. But during the pre-production phase, where we prepared to create the film, our ADs went even further. They consulted sleep doctors and sleep clinic doctors, and they went further into research papers to try to get it done as accurately as possible,” Yu started. “That being said, though, SLEEP is not at all an accurate depiction of sleep disorders. A lot of liberties were taken as the priority was making a fun film, so there shouldn’t be any sort of medical basis or grounds to think about what real life sleepwalking or sleep disorders are like.”
Although the movie is only hitting U.S. theaters in 2024, the process of making it first began in 2021. “I had the idea for quite some time, but I really fleshed it out for roughly two to three months. And then afterwards we, thankfully, only had two major actors to cast, and that took us shorter than I expected, in less than a couple of months,” Yu shared. “Then when we had the cast ready, that gave the investors enough confidence that they would finance the film, and we began pre-production by November 2021. We began shooting in February, and then we shot for about two months in total.”
Creating this film in such a short time was already impressive, but even more so was the fact that this was also Yu’s directorial debut. “[Working as the actual film director] was a whole different ball game. When I was assistant director for other Korean films, I had only a specific world, one specific role, which I had to do and not mess up. So I guess my goal there was just to pull my own weight and not make any mistakes that would ruin the film,” he said. “But for SLEEP, I had to be in control of everything. During my time as an assistant director, I would be the one asking the questions to the director so that we could prepare the film, but now, because I was the director, every cast and crew would ask me about the film, and I had to give them answers and give them direction about how I wanted to proceed.”
Directing a horror film comes with its unique challenges, but working with skilled actors eases the process. “One torturous thing about directing a horror film, and especially editing it, is that you watch it so much that you begin to self doubt a lot, and you begin to doubt whether it’s scary at all,” he said. “That being said, when I did go through the footage after shooting the film, I was surprised to see how much Lee Sun-kyun, the husband’s actor, was doing in the background. He never had dead air in him. Even when he was in the background and not in the shot directly, he was always doing something that I could use during the editing. I was very impressed by it, and it really shows how much of a professional he was.”
SLEEP first premiered during Cannes’ Critics’ Week in April 2023, and will be coming out as a limited time release online and in U.S. theaters on September 27 this year.
