Sleeping Beauty

2011

Action / Drama / Mystery / Romance / Thriller

104
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 48% · 98 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 32% · 50K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.3/10 10 34555 34.6K

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Plot summary

A haunting erotic fairytale about Lucy, a young University student drawn into a mysterious hidden world of beauty and desire.


Uploaded by: OTTO
May 15, 2022 at 03:48 AM

Director

Top cast

Sarah Snook as Flatmate
Daniel Webber as Spy Shop Assistant
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
935.13 MB
1280*692
English 2.0
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 41 min
Seeds 15
1.88 GB
1920*1038
English 5.1
NR
23.976 fps
1 hr 41 min
Seeds 17

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by TdSmth5 5 / 10

A bit too empty

Lucy is your normal young woman. She goes to college, works at some restaurant cleaning tables, at some office making copies, as a test subject in some lab. She has a hard time paying rent. On some nights she goes to some fancy bar where she's up for anything...doing cocaine when offered, accepting sexual offers or offering herself in a very straightforward way. She has some type of innocent romantic friendship with a sick guy.

One day she responds to a work ad in a paper. She goes to the interview with some strict woman who tells her that her vagina won't be penetrated and that they value discretion above else. They inspect her mouth and skin and then have her cleaned up and made up. Her first job is to serve drinks wearing a bikini for some club of old very rich geysers, while other topless girls serve fancy food. She does well and is called back. Now she's drugged and while she sleeps an old guy can do to her whatever he wants, except penetration. Things get weird as one can imagine.

Lucy is kicked out of her apartment and leases a fancy room in a high-rise. The sick guy dies, which seriously affects her. She loses her clerical job. When she sees a sleeping woman on a train she's intrigued and panics. She requests to see what goes on when she sleeps but is rebuffed by the woman. One of the old guys requests as a last wish to drink the sleeping drug and dies sleeping with Lucy, which freaks her out when she wakes up. Apparently he even had some wishes for after his death, which I guess is shown in the final scene but it's not clear.

Ordinarily, I'm more than happy to interpret a movie, but Sleeping Beauty doesn't want to be interpreted. It gives you little to go on and it doesn't give you a reason to care. There's very little dialogue and most of that is utterly meaningless. There are three longer monologues which I guess are supposed to be meaningful. One by Lucy's sick friend about a marsupial mouse, the other two by one of the old guys. There's only one instance that tells us something about Lucy's past. For the most part this movie's scenes are meant to look like living still life. The camera is usually motionless in the center of a symmetric setting. The movie has a cold greenish look to it, strange for an Australian movie. A shame because a warmer color would have gone much better with Browning's naked body. The tone is also cold and distant. Not even Lucy manages to get us to connect with her. As most reviewers mention, there's no shortage of pointless scenes: Lucy sleeping naked, suddenly waking up, just to put on underpants; Lucy walking between buildings, Lucy doing drugs. Lucy is clearly up for anything, but when sick guy asks to watch porn with her, she refuses.

This movie aims for subtlety but overdoes it. What are we to make of all the death surrounding the young Lucy? Of a movie that focuses on sex but whose characters are incapable of it? In the one, single intriguing scene we see the face of the woman/madam not her usual confident self as she listens to one of the old guys and there she looks like an older Lucy. Even though this movie has little going for it aside from the lovely Emily Browning, it's oddly watchable for its Australian good-nature, despite the questionable theme.

Reviewed by grantss 1 / 10

Pretentious nonsense

Australian dramas mostly fall into two broad camps - great crime-dramas, e.g. Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, or pretentious crap, e.g. Jindabyne. Sleeping Beauty is one of the latter, and it takes pretentious crap to levels of pretense and craptacularity usually only the French can muster.

No real point to the movie at all. Plot's initial idea is to shock the audience, and even that feels dull and drawn out, reminding me of Eyes Wide Shut. After that it just drifts around and goes nowhere.

Performances are generally unconvincing and dull, in keeping with the plot. Emily Browning was miscast in the lead role (though every other actress out there should be thanking their lucky stars that they don't have this on their CV).

Avoid at all costs. It will save you nearly two hours of your life.

Reviewed by tomgillespie2002 5 / 10

Will resonate in your mind for some time

In a scene towards the climax of the film, we see Lucy (Emily Browning), taking a lesson at university where the lecturer seems to be analyzing a game of chess. The question is proposed, asking why would someone make a move securing their defeat? This seems to be relevant for Browning's character throughout this very interesting tale of sexual depravity and the detachment of the female body to the masculine libido. Lucy works her way through education, financing her way with various menial jobs. She begins a job with an exclusive, and very clandestine operation, beginning simply with silver service waitressing in "risque" negligee. This of course progresses into a more dangerous level, when she is offered a very well-paid gig involved a drugging so that she may sleep whilst a client does what he wishes. Although, as promised in Lucy's first interview, "Your vagina will not be penetrated". From first time director Julia Leigh, the film has various similarities to Luis Bunuel's excellent Belle de Jour (1967), mainly in it's depiction of a strong female character who wishes to delve into a dangerous world of male desires. However, unlike Bunuel's film, Leigh has created a character in Lucy, who seems utterly detached from the people around her. She does visit Birdman (Ewne Leslie), who seems to be agoraphobic, but this is not elaborated on. She seems also very willing to do things without questioning. In one scene she is offered a pill after her work in a restaurant, she asks what it is, but takes it without having had an answer. The film is self-consciously European in it's atmosphere and pace. The handling of the subject matter is never gratuitous, neither does it spoon feed a message of masochistic perversity. Browning is excellently vacuous in the role, gently drifting from situation to situation with not a question or any adversity. The film is beautiful to look at (and I don't just mean the alabaster figure of the nude Browning), it's pallet of autumnal colours adding extra references to 1970's European cinema. There is no doubt that this film will divide viewers. Dirty old men ogling over a sleeping, naked 22 year old, will make for uncomfortable viewing for some, but I felt that this was not exploitational in it's depiction. We also never really see what these old men do in the time they are given with the "sleeping beauty". All we get is an almost confessional from one of the customers. After being advised by Clara (Rachel Blake) that there is no penetration, the client states: "The only way I can get a hard-on, is if I take 12 Viagra and get a beautiful lady to shove her fingers up my arse". The films conclusion is haunting, beautifully realised and ambiguous. It certainly raises more questions than it answers about this detached and seemingly passive female character in a world of strange male desire. A film that will resonate in your mind some time after it has finished.

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