Jung Yu-mi portrays fragile motherhood in horror thriller ‘Sleep’

Actor Jung Yu-mi has a wide spectrum of unconventional roles in her filmography and has added another with her three-dimensional character in the upcoming film “Sleep,” which follows a newly-wed couple’s bizarre experience surrounding sleepwalking.

Jung returns to the big screen for Jason Yu’s feature debut film “Sleep,” set to hit local screens on Sept. 6, following “Kim Ji-young, born in 1982″ (2019), where she played the titular character, an ordinary 37-year old woman who quits her office job to take care of her newborn child.

In “Sleep,” the 40-year-old actor plays Soo-jin, who struggles to figure out the cause of her husband’s eccentric behaviors at night and increasingly develops supernatural beliefs to cure the symptoms of his sleepwalking.

In the three-act structure, the office worker in the last month of her pregnancy transforms into a new mother who shows aggressive behavior and paranoia over her husband’s somnambulism.

“Both ‘Kim Ji-young, born in 1982′ and ‘Sleep’ tell stories happening inside of a house and I played a domestic character in the movies. However, the director told me that the two characters are different as Kim Ji-young swallows difficulties, while Soo-jin is more proactive and tries to take matters into her own hands,” Jung said during a group media interview at a Seoul cafe on Tuesday.

“Sleep” was screened in the Cannes Critics’ Week section at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, which focuses on the first and second films by emerging directors. It was her second visit Cannes following her appearance for the 2016 Korean zombie thriller “Train to Busan.”

Although the movie falls under the genre of horror, it also blends elements of thriller, romance and black comedy to tell a unique story about sleepwalking.

One of the unexpected moments at this year’s Cannes screening, she said, was hearing laughter from the audience.

“I didn’t think it would be funny because we didn’t have any funny moments during filming. But many people at the Cannes screening were laughing,” Jung said. “When the film was first screened in Korea, I was curious about how it would be received and it turned out people laughed again.”

Jung said she tried to naturally blend into the changing settings to depict emotional fluctuations during her transition to motherhood. In the last part, the apartment is covered with amulets to avert evil against the backdrop of weird red lights, hinting at an unfortunate ending.

“I tend to perform with atmosphere, clothing and makeup in mind. As settings change in each chapter, I kind of grasped what the team wants to portray and tuned in my acting with them,” she said.

She said she was fascinated by the unique story written by Yu and the project went smoothly as her co-star was Lee Sun-kyun, who has performed together in three of Hong Sang-soo’s films — “Lost in the Mountains” (2009), “Oki’s Movie” (2010) and “Our Sunhee” (2013).

“We worked together for the first time in 10 years, but I didn’t feel awkward from the beginning. I think our past working relationship lingers on somewhere, so it must have stuck well,” she said.