Sleeping Beauty

Director: Julia Leigh
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 0.5

A college student (Emily Browning, frequently nude) who does cocaine, screws random men in bars ("I'd love to suck your cock") and can't make rent (because she ... burns money?) signs up for the worst job possible: as a naked companion for elderly men who apparently have a perverse need to actually 'sleep' with young, incapacitated women. Leigh channels Kubrick, but the result is more giggle-worthy and aggravatingly coy than deep - the suggestion that Browning's errant character is metaphorically 'asleep' (and only 'comes to' when the aura of Death Approaches) is suggested but barely developed. This is more of a sketch of a film than a finished product, and merely filming the fragments and splicing them together doesn't create the haunting, thought-provoking after-effect Leigh hoped it would.