Sleeping Beauty (2011)

"You will go to sleep. It will be as if you are dead."

Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is not a dream, but a slow, glacial descent into numbness—a clinical, provocative study of consent, detachment, and the commodification of the female body. This is no fairy tale. It’s a quiet horror that unfolds in silence and stillness, where every frame feels like it’s been embalmed in ice.

At the heart of the film is Lucy (Emily Browning), a young university student who drifts through life like a ghost. With little explanation and no overt trauma, she submits to an exclusive job that requires her to be sedated while elderly, wealthy clients interact with her unconscious body—on the condition that there is no penetration. She is there to be seen, touched, spoken to. But never to awaken, and never to remember.

What follows is not eroticism, but a kind of emotional autopsy. Leigh directs with chilling restraint, using static shots, muted palettes, and minimal dialogue to strip away any comforting narrative structure. We are left only with observation—watching Lucy’s body laid bare while her psyche remains locked behind her impassive eyes. Browning’s performance is fearless in its opacity; she is both vulnerable and unreadable, a porcelain figure who refuses to break or explain.

Sleeping Beauty does not offer judgment. There are no moral outbursts, no climactic revelations. It simply presents—a mirror held to desire, power, and control, with no filter and no sentiment. The ambiguity is deliberate and disturbing. Who is exploiting whom? Is Lucy empowered by her indifference, or destroyed by it? The film asks, but never answers.

And that’s the point. Sleeping Beauty is not here to comfort or entertain—it is here to provoke. To watch it is to enter a trance, to be seduced by its quiet dread and stark beauty. It’s the kind of film that lingers long after it ends, not because of what it shows, but because of what it refuses to reveal. A waking dream? Perhaps. But more truthfully, a beautiful, suffocating nightmare.