Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Julia Leigh's debut concerns Lucy, a university student who funds her tuition through office work, restaurant shifts, and eventually a private service in which wealthy clients pay to lie beside her while she sleeps, sedated and compliant. The title borrows from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, though the film's castle is a country mansion and its spindle is a cup of tea. It premiered at Cannes, ran a limited American release, and grossed roughly enough to cover a modest used car. Critics split down the middle, which is the correct place for a film this deliberately withholding.

The cultural ledger here is thin, and the film seems to want it that way. A female director and a female protagonist circle questions of consent, bodily autonomy, and the price attached to a young woman's unconsciousness, which registers as a faint progressive pulse, though the treatment is ambiguous and refuses instruction. The same goes for the economic critique: rich men purchase access to a body, and Lucy's rent determines her choices, but Leigh never mounts a podium. The nudity is clinical inventory, not celebration, so body positivity finds no foothold. The cast is uniformly white Australian, and the film places no racial, queer, environmental, or neurological concerns on the table. Its gaze is fixed on money, sleep, and the menace of voluntary oblivion.

A picture can be severe, unsettling, and morally serious without carrying the specific ideological freight of its decade. This one is a cold chamber piece about commodification, decorated with art-house discomfort and almost no sermonizing. The temperature registers low. That is not a fault. It is simply a reading, and the thermometer does not care about our feelings.