By the time Julia Roberts appeared in Sleeping with the Enemy in 1991, she was already a global film star, at a time when the term “film star” still meant something, and before it was supplanted by “celebrity,” a word that describes everyone from an 18-year-old hawking bikinis on Instagram to Jason Momoa. She was poised for a career that would, a few years down the line, make her the highest paid female actor of her time, with $20 million for Erin Brockovich (much less than her male co-stars, but still). It seems like a time far away and long ago, but in 1991 Roberts was unimaginably famous and becoming even more so.
And yet, for about a third of the movie, she’s upstaged by a non-human actor: a spectacular, two-floor, impeccably designed modernist house that stunningly blends in with its Cape Cod location, standing in isolated glory far from its nearest neighbour. Its floor to ceiling glass windows provide views on all sides and, it seems, no privacy even in the bedroom where the sun and the moon stream in with their light but that hardly seems to matter to the perfectly matched and gorgeous couple living inside, Martin and Laura Burney (Patrick Bergin and Roberts). From the outside looking in, as a new neighbour does, Laura and Martin seem to have the perfect life in a setting that reflects, literally and metaphorically, their every advantage, privilege, furnishing, and accessories. Martin is a wealthy investment counsellor in Boston and Laura spends all her days keeping the house so clean that everything sparkles, cooking gourmet meals, and somehow also maintaining her stunning figure and looks.
The movie opens with Laura on the beach, her hair flying everywhere as she digs for clams. Martin comes down to her and their conversation seems warm but also oddly stilted, like two people who are married and yet somehow going through the motions. She gets sand on his expensively tailored suit, and he laughs it off and says he’ll change. Which is odd because, really, it’s just sand and is easily brushed off. When we next see them, they’re about to attend a party and the first hint of a crack in the facade is when Martin persuades her to change into the backless black dress he prefers, even after she points out that it will be cold outside. The crack turns into a gaping hole when he slaps and kicks her because she dared to look out of the window at the neighbour. That evening, Laura pelts stones at one of the tall beach lights arranged outside their home until she breaks both its bulbs and it’s unclear why. Afterwards, he apologises with a gift of red lingerie, makes her wear it and then rapes her and we can see that this is a habitual occurrence as she lies under him with her face grimly pretending to enjoy it all.
Later, the two of them go on a nighttime boat trip with the neighbour to enjoy a view of the full moon. We learn that Laura, traumatised by a childhood incident where she nearly drowned, can’t swim and that Martin’s cruelty extends to making the woman he ironically refers to as “Princess” get on the sea with him anyway. An unexpected storm nearly capsizes them and the two men struggle against lashing winds and rain to keep the craft upright. When they turn back to her, Laura has disappeared. The coast guard’s search is futile, and she is presumed to have fallen off and drowned.
This is where we learn, from Laura’s perspective, that she uses the storm to escape—she had been secretly learning to swim at the local YWCA. The broken light bulbs created a gap and showed her where the house was even under a dark sky. While the hunt keeps Martin away, Laura slips off her wedding ring and flushes it down the toilet, cuts and hides her long locks under a wig, recovers a thick wad of money she had hidden along with a bus ticket, and runs away on a bus to Cedar Falls, Iowa. Using the cash she has somehow saved up, she pays to rent a furnished house that is the exact opposite of the one she left behind: filled with overstuffed couches, the windows lined with curtains with a lush cabbage rose pattern, and nestled amidst neighbours on both sides.
Sleeping with the Enemy was an enormous financial success—at the time, it didn’t seem like anything Roberts acted in could ever fail, and the film made $175 million against a $19 million budget. But critics (when have they ever mattered?) mostly panned it. In a review whose sentiments were echoed by others, Roger Ebert wrote that “Sleeping with the Enemy is a slasher movie in disguise, an up-market version of the old exploitation formula where the victim can run, but she can’t hide.” For Ebert, there’s too much that’s simply not believable. For instance, the wedding ring somehow mysteriously remains unflushed for Martin to find and we have to wonder, as we see him fishing it out with his bare hand: did no one use that toilet in the weeks after her death or is it in the guest bathroom? (Also, ew). How did she manage to save so much money and keep it hidden from this control freak?
But beyond these details, Ebert is bothered by what he sees as all the elements of a stock horror movie being used in a domestic drama. Martin is psychotic about order, and insists that all the towels be lined up exactly so and that all the canned goods on the kitchen shelves should be organised neatly with the labels facing outwards. When he tracks Laura down to her new home, her first clue about his presence is that her deliberately mussed up towels have been rearranged. In the final sequence of the film, she tentatively opens her kitchen cabinet and sees, with a shock, that her messy jumble of cans and ingredients has been meticulously rearranged in the old way. At that moment, her face crumples in a combination of realisation, shock, horror and, it seems, surrender as she finds herself facing Martin once again.
For Ebert and others, all of this is too much, overplayed and needlessly exploitative: Ebert refers to the moment with the cans as a “cheap little shock.” Brian D. Johnson in Maclean’s huffs that the movie “trivialises the issue of wife battering.” But they get it wrong: Sleeping with the Enemy isn’t misrepresenting a story about abuse as a horror film. It’s pointing out that domestic abuse is, to the victim, exactly that and unrelentingly so: a daily drama of sheer terror and fright, of every footfall turning into a terrifying portent of emotional and physical pain.
Ebert pokes fun at at the clichés of the film’s ending where Laura manages to finally kill Martin: as she shoots bullet after bullet into him, he still somehow lumbers towards her and, at the very end, just as she bends over what she thinks is his dead body, twists upwards in a last breath of life and tries to kill her. Leaving a man like Martin is like freeing yourself from the clutches of an actual monster, but the fear remains in your bones for long afterwards. In her Iowa house, Laura is startled when a new neighbour and possible lover Ben comes up behind her, and she screams in fear. “Saying goodbye to old ghosts,” is her explanation when he asks if she’s okay. The fears and terror linger.
When she leaves Martin and Cape Cod, Laura gets on a bus at night, hurtling through strange new landscapes with her hair still tucked inside her wig. A woman in the aisle over offers her a green apple, and they strike up a conversation. Asked if she lived “back east,” Laura at first says she had been helping an old friend who needed her help getting away from an abusive husband but, quickly, it becomes clear to the other woman that, of course, she means herself. “How long did you stay with him?” “Too long,” is the answer, “Three years, seven months, six days.” To live with abuse is to live inside time that ticks by slowly, inexorably, each day another reminder of the last one’s horror, each one a premonition of the next day’s terror still to come.
Watching Sleeping now, it’s both shocking and eye-opening to think that a woman could just escape as Laura does. She lands in Iowa without any identification or references and is able to start up a new life with nothing but cash transactions. That would be impossible today (and likely impossible even then for a non-white woman), given that every part of our lives is linked to a surveillance structure that tracks our cell phones and credit cards: it’s unlikely that she could even rent a house today without some kind of financial scrutiny. In the film, Martin has to pay an agency many thousands of dollars to track her down where today a few keystrokes on his home computer might suffice. But he does find her, and instantly activates in her the old fear that comes rushing back.
Sure, some of the details seem a bit much—as Ebert asked, why would he take the time to rearrange cans? But even that really misses the point: Sleeping may play up the horror to box office effect, but it’s also very realistic in portraying the psychopathic nature of many abusers who, like Martin, will actually take all the time they need to make sure that their victims understand how little control they have. For male critics in the ’90s, Sleeping was an unrealistic story that undercuts the real threat to victims of domestic abuse by dressing it up as a slasher or horror film. What they couldn’t or wouldn’t see is that an abusive situation, for the person at the centre of it, is in fact always exactly that: a tale of terror, a house filled with ghosts who keep returning, a horror story without the comfort of a fictional end where the monster is finally stopped in his tracks and made to die.
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