Coming off Zack Snyder‘s disaster Sucker Punch earlier this year, we hoped actress Emily Browning had chosen a more engaging project with Julia Leigh‘s Sleeping Beauty, which debuted at Cannes a few months later. Unfortunately similar issues occurred, although the styles are wildly different. In our review from Cannes we said the erotic fairytale was a “cold exercise in hollow meaningless cinema that will leave you frigid to the core.” I’m still interested due to some of the interesting images presented in the new trailer below via Yahoo, and now IFC Films will release it later this year. Check out the theatrical trailer below.
Synopsis:
Lucy is a young university student possessed by a kind of radical passivity. She lets a flip of a coin decide the outcome of a random sexual encounter and she displays an uncomplaining patience when facing the repetitions of her various menial jobs that fund her studies. One day she answers an ad in the student newspaper and interviews for a job to be a lingerie waitress. But she is secretly being initiated into a world of strange new work; one where she will have to give into absolute submission to her clients by being sedated; becoming a Sleeping Beauty. Eventually this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life and she finally develops the will to break the spell by discovering what happens to her while she sleeps. With a fearless performance by Browning, Leigh creates a bold cinematic vision; one where Lucy, both in her clandestine sexual adventures and in her mundane daily existence, lives with the same unflinching and brutal honesty.
Sleeping Beauty hits theaters on December 2nd and VOD on November 1st.