Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me (2023) Review: How do you deal with love that could not materialize into anything substantial? How does one grieve over its emotional trappings when the burden of responsibilities comes into the picture? Robert Wichrowski’s ‘Tonight You’re Sleeping with Me’ is an attempt to capture the same bewilderment through its central characters. Written by Anna Janyska, this new Polish-language romance is based on Anna Szczypczynska’s novel.
Throughout its duration, the film takes a look at the conflicts revolving around the desires of its characters. It follows them through the eyes of Nina (played by Roma Gasiorowska), an accomplished journalist who is well-respected in her field and at her workplace. Her job often is to look beyond the primary perceptions of anything to discover the truth along the way. With two lovely daughters, a handsome husband (played by Wojciech Zielinski), and a successful career, her life seems happy and content from the outside.
While her husband keeps abandoning his responsibilities and putting a burden on her work-life balance, she is often reminded by others of her precious life. That makes it impossible for her to express her discontent. Through the same, a factor of guilt unnecessarily befalls her whenever she desires to experience the joy of spontaneity the way he does.
When he suddenly decides to go on a solo trip to Iceland, she is left with doing all the heavy lifting in their marriage. As a result of that, as a viewer, you struggle to empathize with him even when you see him going through a mid-life crisis. While you sense that he also wants to have a personal space and time away from a life with their children, you see him as the villain since she does not get the same freedom to make such an impulsive decision.
Around the same time, Nina meets her old flame – Janek (Maciej Musial), who makes her take action over her discontent. While he starts working as her junior in the office, their shared romantic history becomes a reason why she cannot see him only as a colleague. There is still a bit of attraction and spark that makes them want to rekindle their romance. The film spends a whole lot of its time conventionally exploring her extra-marital affair with him with nothing new to add or express.
Since her husband is out on a trek in a foreign land, Janek becomes the ideal man in her life. He takes care of her children, remembers what they like or dislike, and provides emotional support to her. She sees him as what her husband could not provide her. But when she looks back at her parents’ life and their similar urges from the past, the aspect of selfishness comes into the picture. Is she allowed to think only of herself? She contemplates that.
In their own ways, both Nina’s parents lead her to make a conventional choice of choosing family over everything else. You sense their own pain reflecting through this advice. Nina struggles between the choice she wants to make and the one she needs to make. In between this mental struggle, both the men in her life go through their own emotional upheavals. Her husband realizes the importance of a partner and the impermanence of a relationship when he introspects on his own life. On the other hand, Janek keeps desiring Nina and making space for her and her children in his life.
As evident through this summary, this new Netflix release works with an incredibly thin plot and ends up conveying very little through its execution. While you feel sorry for a woman struggling to find satisfaction in her life despite all the apparent success, the film loses you the moment you realize that it has nothing new to say about these emotional conflicts or moral obligations.
Only a few occasional moments shine due to the overbearing compassion between its characters. The acting performances by Roma Gasiorowska and Maciej Musial help in those rare instances, even when the script lacks depth. The cinematography is refreshing enough to make you fall for their romance. Yet the triteness keeps creeping up every time it compensates it with a piece of music.
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Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me (2023) Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes
Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me (2023) Cast: Roma Gasiorowska, Maciej Musial, Wojciech Zielinski
Where to watch Tonight You're Sleeping With Me
