Before I Go to Sleep prefers creepy car parks to feelings

Before I Go To Sleep is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestselling thriller of 2011, but whereas the book was smart, gripping, ingeniously plotted and had psychological depth — who are we, when we can’t remember who we are? — this is a disappointment on so many levels. It’s not as if it’s even set in Crouch End, north London, any more. According to my press notes, Crouch End was not deemed sufficiently ‘cinematic’, which has to be upsetting, if you live in Crouch End, as I do, and have always said to people, ‘Come on over. You’ll love it. It’s just so very cinematic round here’, but there you are. I suppose I’ll learn to live with it, as uncinematically as I can.

The film, which is now set in a modernist 1960s house in an unspecified UK location — oh!; how cinematic! — opens rather brilliantly, with a sudden jolt, with the close-up of a single, startled, bloodshot eye.