Consider a dose of caffeine before you 'Go to Sleep'

Don't be fooled by the Halloweeny title.

"Before I Go to Sleep" only sounds like a nerve-wracking noir suspense thriller. The movie itself feels more like a low-grade Hitchcockian mystery exploring two of Hollywood's favorite subjects, amnesia and romantic obsession. (I was going to dub this movie, "Alfred Hitchcock's 50 First Dates," but I see that Variety's Guy Lodge beat me to it.)

Nicole Kidman plays Christine Lucas, a British woman who loses her memory every time she wakes up in the morning, forcing her extremely patient husband Ben (Colin Firth) to give her a daily primer about her life.

Ever since a terrible accident almost killed her, Christine suffers from anterograde amnesia, meaning that all her "new" memories become erased during sleep, and she wakes up every day believing herself to still be in her 20s.

Talk about mirror shock.

One morning, Christine receives a call from a mysterious Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong) instructing her to retrieve a digital camera from a shoe box in her closet, and catch up on her video diary she's been secretly recording without Ben's knowledge. They apparently agreed to do this earlier.

So far, so perplexing.

Soon, director Rowan Joffe's screenplay, based on the novel by S.J. Watson, piles on the complications and contradictions.

Wait a minute! Her injuries were no accident. Someone beat Christine nearly to death and left her naked in a parking lot outside the Renaissance Hotel near the airport. Why didn't Ben tell the truth?

Wait a minute! Christine has a son who died of leukemia years ago. Why didn't Ben tell the truth?

Wait a minute! Why doesn't Christine have friends or relatives to check on her for years?

Also, if Christine loses her memory like Dory the fish in "Finding Nemo," how will she ever be able to put all the facts together to make sense of the truth?

"Before I Go to Sleep" is the kind of mystery where it's best just to go with the show and trust that Joffe can weave all these fragments together in an explanatory whole that doesn't fly off the rails of credibility. He mostly succeeds, with exceptions for some genre silliness we might expect in purposefully manipulative amnesia/obsession thrillers.

Kidman's bloodshot right eyeball gets a lot of close-ups in cinematographer Ben Davis' carefully framed imagery, accompanied by Edward Shearmur's generically symphonic score that goes haywire in all the right places.

Despite a palpable chemistry between Kidman and Firth (they also starred as a psychologically troubled married couple in "The Railway Man"), "Before I Go to Sleep" lacks the level of sheer suspense and fear factor we've come to expect in amnesia thrillers (the best example being the daring "Memento").

Joffe also squanders what few opportunities he has for some welcome humor, preferring to keep the mood oh-so-serious, like Strong's inflexibly monotonous shrink, whose admission of feelings for his patient packs all the passion of a Ben Stein monologue.

By the time the film's forced feel-good finale flits by, "Before I Go to Sleep" inspires viewers to think about the really big questions, such as "why doesn't a single person come out of the rooms at the Renaissance Hotel when the fire alarm sounds?"

“Before I Go to Sleep”

★ ★

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

Directed by: Rowan Joffe

Other: A Clarius Entertainment release. Rated R for language and violence. 92 minutes