Before I Go To Sleep will bend your mind

This on-the-edge-of-your-seat mind bender is based on Steve Watson's best-selling novel questioning if 'we are just a sum of our memories' and, even more perplexing, 'what is left if you take away our memories?' These questions preoccupied Watson as he looked for material for his debut novel. A former NHS clinical scientist, Watson had won a place on a writing course at the Faber & Faber creative writing academy in London in January 2009 and was scanning the obituary pages of the newspapers in search of ideas for characters.

Patient HM

"One of the obituaries I read was of a man called Henry Molaison," Watson reveals. "He was known as Patient HM for most of his adult life. He had had severe amnesia as a result of an operation he'd had to try to cure him of his epilepsy. At the age of 26, they had removed those parts of his brain they thought were responsible. What they hadn't known was that those parts of his brain were also responsible for forming new memories. He died aged 86."

This sparked a mental image, which became the opening scene of the book, and is now the opening scene of the film. "I imagined him getting up and seeing his reflection in the mirror," Watson describes. "He expected to see a young man and instead sees someone in his 70s or 80s. This triggered the idea of a woman meeting her own reflection and seeing someone very different from the person she is expecting."

Watson's novel, Before I Go To Sleep, has been sold to more than 30 countries and reached number seven on the US bestseller list, the highest position for a debut novel by a British author since JK Rowling.

Watson's brainchild is brilliantly realised by UK director Rowan Joffé (Brighton Rock, The American), featuring top-notch performances by Kidman and her co-stars: Oscar winner Colin Firth as the husband she no longer knows, and Mark Strong as Dr Nasch, the man who may or may not be helping her to regain her memory.

The victim of a conspiracy

"What's great about this story is that you are never sure whether you are watching a movie about a woman who, as a result of a brain injury, misconstrues the world around her and believes she is the victim of a conspiracy," says Joffé, "or a thriller in which a character with amnesia is being exploited for some nefarious ends by the men around her and she needs to figure out what, who and why quickly, or she'll be in jeopardy."

The film is concerned with the universal themes of identity, love and loss, confronting them within a gripping thriller format. One of the biggest challenges of taking the written story to the screen was how to portray the diary in which Christine writes. Much of the dynamism of Watson's novel takes place within Christine as she struggles to comprehend the emotional impact of her always-new reality. Marshall describes the breakthrough moment when they realised it should become a video diary.

"Suddenly the script came alive. It became an even better part for an actress because you've got acting inside the camera and acting to the camera and it's such an intense part to play."

A very specific challenge

For Joffé, stories with plot twists present a very specific challenge as they rely on the story functioning well on two levels: the ostensible story and the actual story. "Normally, what happens in the actual story has got to be really dramatic because when you reveal it, the audience has got to go 'Oh my God'," says Joffé.

"But the ostensible story must be dramatic too. It has to disguise the fact there's something else going on. So the red herring must be a really vivid red or the audience won't be interested. And as you are spending the body of the film telling the ostensible story, it had better be dramatic, in and of itself."

The inner life and the merry-go-round of semi-memories and flashbacks that is Christine's character are brilliantly woven into this tapestry of 'what if' by editor Melanie Oliver, whose most recent credits include Les Miserables and Anna Karenina.

"Where do we start and how do we get to the end without it feeling like we've told the story many, many times?" says Oliver. "It's been a wonderful exercise of pockets of information, and then we have to erase them and then we have to sort of jolt the memory again. We've been playing with sound and music quite a lot as a form of recall."

"It's just really hard to find great thrillers, for me it was such a strong thriller," says Nicole Kidman. "There are so few good thrillers. It's probably my favourite film genre, and I'd been looking and looking. I made a film years ago called The Others, and it's one of my favourite films that I've made, and so I've been looking for something that has the same sort of twists and turns and thrills, and this had that."

A mixture

"It's a genre picture, but I feel it's got so much more texture than that," she says. "I would hope that it's a mixture. There's the ride, which a thriller has to deliver on, and I hope there are a couple of moments that are really big gasps, or screams. But I'm interested much more in psychological thrillers than I am in straight horror thrillers, even though I'll go see horror films because I'm a horror fan.

"I'm not sure how many horror films I'd want to make, but the psychological thriller for me, is one of the greatest film genres, if you can achieve it. Don't Look Now, is one of my all-time favourite movies, which I've watched maybe 20 times, so I would hope I would get to do a couple of really great psychological thrillers in my career. I would hope this is one of them."

For Joffé, the film is about the mysteriousness of life. "As humans, we don't have all the answers," says the director, "that's what's so profoundly entertaining about this film. We are locked in a very subjective experience as human beings, constantly trying to get to the truth and we never get there. This movie is about that, and it's about the fun of the process and the adventure of it."

Challenge your memory and perception and lose yourself in Before I Go To Sleep. It provokes the imagination and offers first-rate entertainment.

Be warned: Before I Go To Sleep has a major twist, so be aware of those who would spoil your journey into this incredible story by revealing the ending. Rather see it cold and enjoy every second of this well-crafted thriller.

Read more about Before I Go To Sleep and other new films now showing at www.writingstudio.co.za