Sleeping Beauty

Directed by Julia Leigh

(Not rated)

***

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The directorial debut of novelist Julia Leigh is “something of a puzzle,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Another small, risky movie, it stars Emily Browning as Lucy, a broke and dispassionate Australian student who accepts a job requiring that she be drugged into deep sleep while wealthy older men do what they want with her naked body—provided there’s no sexual penetration. “In outline,” the premise promises either prurience or “a grim cautionary tale.” But Leigh instead has created a “deadpan surrealistic sex farce” that trades on the gap between Lucy’s aimlessness and men’s idealized vision of her. Browning makes the tale more interesting than it would be otherwise, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. “To be at once earthy and ethereal is an uncommon gift,” and here the performer’s sublime groundedness makes the “drooling” patrons look by contrast like self-deluded fools. Intriguingly, Lucy’s motivations are never fully explored, said Anna Smith in Empire. You might even conclude—“if you can handle the creepiness”—that this Sleeping Beauty is principally a haunting portrayal of men mourning their lost virility.