Sleeping Beauty (2011)
4/5. Trailer. · Wikipedia entry for the film.
Julia Leigh’s directorial debut, starring Emily Browning as a university student who takes on stranger and stranger side jobs to make ends meet, the strangest being a role at a discreet clinic that puts her to sleep — literally, drugged unconscious — so wealthy older men can pay to be alone in a room with her. She never knows what happens while she’s under.
It’s shot in Sydney but deliberately scrubbed of place: the cast plays it in a flat, neutral accent, nothing distinctly Australian or British about it. That placelessness works in the film’s favor — it keeps the whole thing feeling like it’s happening somewhere adjacent to the real world rather than in it.
What holds the movie together for me isn’t the premise so much as the power dynamics underneath it. Lucy is broke, drifting, and quietly self-destructive — there’s a clear implication of a past eating disorder and/or addiction, and a subplot with a friend she’s been through rehab with that she still looks after. She’s making a series of choices that read as autonomous on the surface, but every one of them is downstream of not having many real options. The clinic arrangement is the most literal version of that: she’s consenting to something she has no way of actually verifying, because she’s unconscious for the part that matters.
That’s the part of the film I keep turning over — whether informed consent means much when the person in question can’t observe what she’s consenting to. The movie doesn’t resolve it, and I don’t think it’s trying to.
Caveat here: I’m not a professional film critic, I watched this pretty casually, and my memory of the specifics is fuzzy — I went back to double check some plot details for this write-up and didn’t even remember there was a funeral scene. But what stuck with me is that Lucy tries to get not one but two different men in her life to marry her. I don’t remember exactly how the first one landed. The second, as I recall, had already moved on to another woman by the time she asked. Her sense of what’s a reasonable ask seems genuinely impaired in those moments — but it’s also about the most naked signal the film gives of how needy and unhappy she actually is underneath the flat affect she carries through most of it.
There’s a costuming detail that’s stuck with me: Lucy is put in white lingerie, while the women who’ve been doing this job longer are dressed in black. It’s not just a color-coding gimmick — the black-clad women play jaded, worn down in the way you’d expect from someone who’s been doing sex work for decades, even though nothing about their bodies says that. They’re young, still tight and lifted, and it’s the affect, not the physique, that’s supposed to read as used up. That mismatch is doing a lot of quiet work.
I’ll own the other half of my reaction too: this is a film built around beautiful, mostly-nude women in a controlled, deliberate setting, and I enjoyed looking at it on those terms, not just as a thing to intellectualize. I wouldn’t call the film gorgeous, though. It plays Lucy as a kind of “virgin” figure who is obviously nothing of the sort, and leans on imagery to sell that anyway — the bed she’s put to sleep on is lush, white, immaculate, almost bridal. But everything outside that one room is the opposite. There’s a shot of her walking to get picked up for one of these appointments, passing a used mattress leaning against a fence in an alley — grimy, discarded, the exact thing that bed is pretending not to be. It reads like a small statement that the whole world around that curated room is a little dirty, a little used up, badly tended to. I don’t mind the sleazy, greasy side of that at all — I just wouldn’t call it gorgeous. The clinical, over-lit visual language in the central room is cold on purpose and effective because of it, but the film is more interested in that clash between polished and grimy than in being beautiful throughout.
I’d recommend it — it’s a slow, kink-adjacent movie that works both as something to sit with and think about, and as something to just enjoy.