Australia's celebrated modern-Gothic novelist Julia Leigh turns to feature filmmaking with this sinister take on the Sleeping Beauty myth. The result is technically accomplished but inert. It's an eerie experience of disturbing imagery and troubling emotional weight. Leigh subverts the compelling suspense with a vignette-heavy plot in which questions pile atop more questions.
Beautiful, enigmatic college student Lucy (Emily Browning) juggles several part-time jobs including sex for pay. An ad in the student paper brings her into the employ of Clara (Rachael Blake), an elegant older woman whose prostitution business provides nude servants, and more, for elite clients whose festivities echo the infamous orgy scenes in "Eyes Wide Shut." Lucy's role is to drink a sleeping potion so that clients her grandfather's age can have their way with her unconscious body.
Though it's set in contemporary Australia, the film feels as if it takes place in an eerie and morbid parallel universe. Most scenes unfold in interiors framed to inspire claustrophobia. Leigh is an economical filmmaker, skillfully making each shot burrow under the viewer's skin. Every event -- a phone call, a college lab experiment, a strained garden-party chat -- implies gathering doom.
Leigh skillfully tells the tale almost entirely through charged visuals. The terse dialogue gives away nothing, adding to the feeling of dire premonition. The clammy dread infects the actors, who seem embalmed with fixed, indifferent expressions. The abrupt finale isn't the fitting wrap-up that this kinky psychodrama deserves. I don't mind working to decode a film's meaning, but here I felt that I had been given too few pieces to work out the puzzle. Leigh is a promising talent. While I can't endorse her debut film, I'll be eager to see what she does next.