6. Colin Firth Is The Baddie - Before I Go To Sleep
The Twist: Nicole Kidman is an amnesiac and finds herself interacting with the same two men every day, Colin Firth and Mark Strong. Trying to unravel the mystery of her condition (hard when your memories reset every day), Kidman's Christine eventually discovers that her husband (Firth) is actually a dangerous impostor. How dare you, Darcy. Why It's So Dumb: Before I Go To Sleep suffered distinctly from an inability to commit. Unlike Memento, the high watermark against which all memory loss movies must be judged, the movie is too eager to move the narrative forward at the behest of its character. The audience is given so much more information than its hero, to the extent where it's hard to empathise with Christine (and the question of what's happening to her). In regards to the twist, the film teases things a little too much. Its focus is so tight that clearly one of the two men is a bad-un and after Strong's Dr. Nasch is suspected and cleared of manipulation, obviously it's husband Ben who's not as he seems. It certainly doesn't help that the film thinks it's being really smart by having the typically bad actor (Strong) not be the bad guy. While it's a nice observation, the Jaguar advert before the movie had already pointed that out.
