Lifetime
Lifetime brings Marissa Finch’s psychological thriller Don’t Fall Asleep to the screen in an edge-of-your-seat production that could have easily been taken to the silver screen, even though the powers that be decided at some point to change the title to the more lurid … and misleading … Lifetime-worthy I Killed Him in My Sleep.
Note: Spoilers will be unavoidable, so if you plan to watch the movie please come back to read the review after doing so.
Abigail Breslin stars as Kelty Crawford, a young woman who suffers from intensely violent nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking following a horrific and tragic automobile accident that resulted in a death. Kelty’s best friend Brihanna is always by Kelty’s side, offering her as much support as she can, her co-worker/boss Parker also gives her quite a bit of leeway to deal with her emotional distress and PTSD from the accident, and her fiancé Evan is more than supportive, doing all he can to keep her safe, never wavering in his love for her even as she ends up in seriously dangerous situations during sleepwalking incidents, from breaking a lamp to making her way outside while carrying a hammer. Everyone agrees she needs help, and while she and Evan attend couples therapy, that is not addressing her real sleep issues. Parker relays to her that a friend of his attended a sleep study that also pays $3,000 … money she could use to pay off some of her mounting debt from impulse buying (probably while asleep) that she hides from Evan. She decides to do the study, and after Dr. Baylour injects her with something to really help her sleep, Kelty experiences a horrifically vivid dream about the murder of a man she does not know. When she awakens, she learns that the man in her dream, Alex Garcia, was killed two years earlier, but his body was only recently located. Kelty begins to really fall apart emotionally, but she feels the need to locate the man’s widow, Gina. She begs Brihanna to go with her, and Brihanna cryptically says that she is Kelty’s ride or die, literally.
Lifetime
The encounter with Gina does not go well, and when she is caught snooping in another room and looking at family photos, Gina throws Kelty out of her house. Kelty is also notified that the pending $3,000 to her bank account was revoked and when she goes to the building where the sleep study was conducted, she finds it vacant and in disarray as if they had to clear out quickly. Kelty manages to track down a woman with the same last name as the doctor, and shows up at the university where she teaches, learning she is Dr. Baylour’s ex-wife and there is no love lost between them. After pleading with her because she feels that whatever the doctor did to her is causing her to lose her mind, the ex reluctantly gives her an address where Kelty may find him … and tells her to never darken her doorway again. Kelty does find him and threatens to blackmail him if he doesn’t give her the same drug she had at the study so she can go to sleep and try to make her dream make sense. He does, but before she leaves he drops something into her purse that will become important later. At this point, Evan has been locking her in the bedroom at night for her safety, and Brihanna has told her that as much as she loves Kelty, she has given her as much love and support as she can, and it’s time Kelty make some new friends … because Brihanna was the person who died in the accident. Kelty has just created her as a support mechanism due to her PTSD. Kelty checks herself into a motel, telling Evan she’s just working all night, and takes the drug, falling into a deep sleep and recalling the night of the murder. She, Brihanna and Parker were all out drinking and Kelty was feeling especially affected by the booze so she stepped outside for some air. Turns out it wasn’t the booze that affected her. While behind the bar, she remembered that she was sexually assaulted by a man in a, yes, Black Hoodie and it was Alex who came to her rescue, the assailant stabbing him to death in the parking lot. Waking up in the morning, she pays a visit to Parker to tell him about the dream, recalling that the man in the hoodie called her an ‘uppity bitch’, which triggered something in Parker, as if that really hit a nerve. He asks Kelty to stay put, but now she believes she did trigger something in him, and fearing that he was the rapist, she fights him off as she tries to flee and notifies the police that Parker is Alex Garcia’s killer. Armed with this information, Kelty has to contact Gina again to tell her what truly happened to her husband, and she is shocked to discover that Gina’s contact information was already in her phone. Gina agrees to meet with her, and when asked why she didn’t tell her about any of this before, Kelty says she had been repressing the memories of the trauma and only recently started remembering. Gina surprises her when she tells Kelty she had called her two years ago and said her name was Grace, which is Kelty’s middle name. Gina said she was hysterical and told Gina that Alex saved her, and Gina asked to meet so they could go to the police together but she never showed up. Now it all makes sense — she and Brihanna were on their way to meet Gina when they had the accident. Kelty confirms to her that she believes Parker murdered Alex, and Gina asks if that was her roommate, which totally confuses Kelty because she and Evan were roommates before they were romantically involved, but at the time she told Gina that she could not believe she let such a monster move in with her … and she told Gina that he killed her husband. Kelty is totally confused now, especially as she may have implicated the wrong person, so she returns home to Evan who is now acting weird, certain that she is beginning to remember exactly what happened. Feeling scared, Kelty begins recording the conversation on her phone without Evan’s knowledge, but he becomes violent and slugs her in the face. When she comes to, she’s locked in the basement with him, and he admits that he had basically been stalking her since they happened to meet when both of them were on vacation. He ditched his girlfriend at the time and moved to Seattle, tracking her down through a private investigator and working his way into her life. But now that she knows the truth, that he was the one who raped her and killed Alex, he has no other choice but to kill them both by setting the basement on fire, and whatever Dr. Baylour dropped into her purse may be her only chance of survival.
Lifetime
Despite Lifetime’s best efforts to make us think Kelty committed the murder of Alex Garcia in her sleep, I KIlled Him in My Sleep rises above its tawdry title to give us a gripping thriller with a mystery and a solution that only becomes evident during Kelty’s last dream sequence (if you look closely at the eyes of the man in the Black Hoodie, despite his face being covered you can clearly see it is Evan), though things were very well set up to make us believe it was Parker (even though there was no way he could have slipped away from Brihanna in the bar — who was his girlfriend — and change clothes to assault Kelty). The screenplay by Katie Boland expertly builds the suspense, keeping the viewer as off-balance as Kelty, never revealing Brihanna’s true fate until necessary, using that one clever line about being Kelty’s literal ride or die as a hint, really employing that tactic used in The Sixth Sense to show the two together while Brihanna is never in a scene where she would have to interact with others. You never pay it any mind so it does come as a great surprise when she is revealed to have been the victim in the accident. The Evan character is also presented as the perfect companion, completely understanding of Kelty’s situation and willing to do anything to help, never once hinting about his more sinister intentions, but when Gina relates everything from her and Kelty’s conversation two years earlier, which had been blocked by Kelty’s trauma, it all just hits like a ton of bricks. I really can’t think of any false moves or really contrived situations in the screenplay. Boland has just constructed it so well that you are happy to go along for the ride, being surprised by the new information at the same time as Kelty. Boland also directed the film and has done a great job with the actors and keeping all of the story’s twists and turns under wraps until just the right moment. This may be a movie, like The Sixth Sense, that demands rewatching to see if there are clues planted throughout the story that are not evident on a first viewing but gives you an ‘oh my gosh’ moment on a rewatch. Great job by Boland. Totally worthy of Emmy nominations for both the writing and directing.
Lifetime
Abigail Breslin is also magnificent as Kelty, a complex character with many levels to her, someone that we as an audience have to identify with or can just relate to so that we can empathize and sympathize with her as the story unfolds. There are times when Kelty can be a little difficult because she internalizes so much of her trauma, some of her thoughts conveyed in a voice over, so Breslin still have to make Kelty someone we care about, and she has to take us on the ride, keeping us in the dark about everything just as Kelty is. We only get one step ahead after that last dream, and we know that Parker was not the killer before she does, and that then makes it all the more exciting to watch Breslin’s performance as the reality of the situation finally dawns on her. If this were on any other major network, Breslin would certainly be in contention for an Emmy nomination for her work.
Lifetime
Breslin is ably supported by an excellent cast. Bethany Brown is terrific as Brihanna, the best friend anyone would want. She is funny and supportive, always there for Kelty … and never letting on that she is just a phantom that Kelty has created to help her deal with the situation. I was shocked and saddened to learn Brihanna was dead because that likely meant we would not be treated to Brown’s appearance from that point on as Brihanna is finally allowed to on. Landon Liboiron is also terrific as Evan, always the attentive, understanding and loving boyfriend/fiancé, never having a cross word for Kelty as her dreams and sleepwalking escalate into really dangerous territory, never giving away until the end who Evan really is and how he was involved in not only the murder — which he admits got out of hand — but Kelty’s accident (which he caused but still manages to blame on her). Liboiron takes Evan from charming to chilling with ease, even when trying to justify his actions of being a creepy stalker. It really is a skillful performance. Josh Collins gives Parker a very laid back quality, being much more understanding as a boss than anyone would be in real life. But his behavior makes sense once it’s revealed he was Brihanna’s boyfriend, and he is the one person who truly understands what Kelty is going through. And even though we are pretty sure after Kelty’s dream that Evan is the killer, Collins still manages to play Parker with just enough suspicion to make us question his innocence. Michael Eklund is also very good as Dr. Baylour, making us wonder from the start if he is on the up-and-up, always acting a bit questionably with Kelty and being very shady by putting something in her purse without her knowledge. But Eklund also conveys that Baylour is a tortured soul, consumed with learning how dreams and sleep issues can impact people, trying to save others from the fate of his own sister, who died during a sleepwalking incident. But he does get a moment of redemption at the end, and he’s not really the ‘asshole’ his ex-wife believes him to be (her words). Aliyah O’Brien also plays Gina very well, especially when she agrees to meet Kelty and becomes the key that really unlocks her repressed memories. We don’t know what happens after their meeting, but one would hope that they could bond over their experiences and losses, Gina becoming the new friend Kelty needs.
If you only saw the commercials for I Killed Him in My Sleep, you would be forgiven for thinking this was just going to be a lurid, Lifetime pot-boiler with a central character who goes on murder sprees while she’s asleep. Instead it is a multi-layered, deeply engrossing mystery with a well-crafted story, very well-drawn characters, and an excellent cast that never plays its hand too soon and gives it all away before the midway point as so often happens with TV movies. This story will keep you guessing and on the edge of your seat until the end. It is well worth the watch.
I Killed Him in My Sleep has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
I Killed Him in My Sleep | Official Trailer
Lifetime