In the 2024 crime-thriller Sleeping Dogs, former screenwriter turned director Adam Cooper depicts Russel Crowe as a retired cop struggling with a reopened murder case while piecing together his own memories, scrambled from Alzheimer’s. Despite the at times plot-patchy, cliché nature of the film, there is a certain je ne sais quoi captured in the noir-esque directorial touch from Cooper and the brooding, yet albeit riveting performance from Crowe, that together somehow keep one watching.
The film’s plot pieces together a very winding and occasionally convoluted story through a quietly building puzzle. Roy (Crowe) undergoes an experimental surgery in an attempt to stimulate neural pathways, revealing spotty haunting memories in hallucinatory dream-like mirages. After being contacted by a death-row prisoner, put away by Roy himself 10 years earlier, the closed case, once neatly tucked away in a filing cabinet, slowly begins to tangle when a last-minute plea of innocence reveals things weren’t exactly what they seemed at the scene of the crime. This film combines all the sickly entertaining features of a psychological thriller with the enthusiastic inclusion of all the crime-thriller fun, adapted from Eugen Ovidiu Chirovici‘s novel The Book of Mirrors.
The Intriguing Darkness of Roy Freeman in ‘Sleeping Dogs’
Roy Freeman wakes each day alone in a dimly lit, overwhelmingly grey apartment, surrounded by messy handwritten notes that remind him who he is, where he is, and even how to prepare a TV dinner—notably, the only food available to him. This is the slowly decaying life he has come to accept. That routine is shattered, however, when he receives a call from Emily Dietz, a volunteer with a prison bail charity, played by Kelly Grayson, which changes the fabric of his life for good.
Dietz begs Freeman, emphatically, to visit a former junkie now on death row, charged with a murder that Roy himself helped solve. It’s alleged the inmate, Issac Samuel, played by Pacharo Mzembe, murdered the charismatic, intelligent Dr. Joseph Weider, a psychology professor. However, after paying a visit, Issac confesses a desperate plea of innocence. And thus, with his brain still scrambled from an experimental surgery, Roy is off to rewrite history and solve the Weider case once and for all.
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Prepare to be unsettled.
Though the acting, lighting, and camera work at times strike farther from a professional film noir feature, and closer to a film student’s final project, the plot set before the audience is undeniably gripping. Immediately, one must decide who is trustworthy: an unreliable recovering addict struggling with Alzheimer’s, or a convicted felon with an extensive crime record. At just 16, strung out, and found at the wrong place at the wrong time, Isaac was brought in for questioning and pushed to admit guilt. Now, a decade later, he vehemently protests, claiming he is many things, but not a killer. The fate of his life is in the hands of a man who can’t even piece together his own life, let alone the loss of someone else’s.
‘Sleeping Dogs’: When Leaning into Melodrama Works
Admittedly, most plot points of the film tread dangerously close to Clue-esque board game storytelling. However, it is exactly this winding, patchy, stereotypical crime-thriller story that defines the film. It’s a classic whodunit that’s practically factory-made for guaranteed entertainment. From seemingly innocent, unassuming antagonists to dark, seedy anti-heroes, Sleeping Dogs is the result of an unabashed leaning in toward clichés.
As the reinvestigation is launched, a dark love story turned murder is retold through a novel by the recently deceased author, Richard Finn. The book, titled The Book of Mirrors (Included perhaps as a nod to author Chirovici), was inspired by the Wierder case. Following this story and each character involved allows Roy to piece together the real Weider murder. While this may read as slightly convoluted and relatively difficult to follow, that is also exactly how the film itself feels. It is winding, it is a big nonsensical, but it is also most certainly entertaining. To watch Roy explore a cold-case murder by taking a back entrance through a fictional story inspired by that murder is to watch him put together a puzzle inside a puzzle. And to pick apart each piece, or pull even slightly at the red-string plot, is to lose sense of it entirely. Rather, to simply enjoy what the film presents on a surface level and to enjoy the, at times, cartoonish plot, is to allow the film to exist in the way it was meant to.
What propels this film forward is how Roy, stripped of his memories, is able to eventually use this as a strength. And as his memories are revealed and slowly turned over, this protagonist realizes he’s much more involved in the story than he initially thought. And more than that, he has a secret of his own. Through Crowe’s anchoring portrayal, his character perfectly teeters the line between off-putting and entirely innocent with expert exactness. His acting chops not only ground the film entirely but also raise it up from an overly windy crime-thriller to a uniquely gripping late-night must-watch.