Sleeping with the Enemy

In Sleeping with the Enemy, a chilling look at marital abuse gives way to a streamlined thriller [from the novel by Nancy Price] delivering mucho sympathy for imperiled heroine Julia Roberts and screams aplenty as she's stalked by her maniacal husband. Read full review

It's an efficiently crafted psychological thriller that keeps you guessing - even when you're sure that you have all the answers. [08 Feb 1991, p.6]

Sleeping With the Enemy is bound to be a crowd pleaser, with its cool, crazed villain and with Julia Roberts in the lead, as a woman who fakes her death in order to escape her husband. But everything surprising and gripping about the movie happens in the first 20 minutes, and after that it follows a predictable course. [08 Feb 1991, p.C1]

Varying the pace, altering the tone, Ruben definitely keeps us off balance. Not as good as it could be, a far sight better than it might have been, this is a movie that puts the lie to the computer's stern dictum: garbage in, passable entertainment out. [08 Feb 1991]

Sleeping With The Enemy teeters constantly on the verge of silliness but director Joseph Ruben keeps the cornball melodrama scaled down to a pleasant lull. Read full review

Audiences get what they pay for: suspense, chills and a bloody resolution as Sleeping with the Enemy charts its predictable course with Martin tracking Laura to small-town Iowa where she's being courted by a patient, polite, fuzzy-bearded drama teacher named Ben. But the picture doesn't delve deeply enough into the problem of spouse abuse. [08 Feb 1991, p.7]

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there. Read full review

Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her. Read full review

This is in the 'never trust appearances' mould popularised by Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights. Read full review

Ruben, at least, is adept with suspense tactics. He keeps Bergin lurking off screen for an agonizingly long time and he knows his suspenseful way around a bathtub. There's also some respectably scary business to do with neatly arranged bathroom towels and food cans in the pantry. But Ruben is merely modulating mediocre material. Read full review

The script itself—credited to Ronald Bass, and adapted from Nancy Price's novel—is a tissue of so many stupid and implausible contrivances that the only possible way of enjoying it is by taking your brain out to lunch. Read full review

Ultimately Sleeping With the Enemy wants to be about one woman's rebirth, but Roberts neither grows nor glows in this empty movie. Read full review

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

Director Joseph Ruben would have done much better to limit the physical horror and make it more of a psychological terror game. Read full review

Everything that might have set Sleeping With the Enemy apart and made it memorable--textured central characters, psychological depth or a shred of believability--has been swept aside in the rush to make the movie a luxury item, sleekly gorgeous, blankly watchable, not unlike its star Julia Roberts. Read full review

Basically, it's an inversion of an already proven formula, a kind of Fatal Attraction's Revenge, with every bit of business save the parboiled rabbit, and you can see the ending coming up Main Street. [08 Feb 1991, p.G5]

Ronald Bass' predictable screenplay gives Roberts no brains at all, which is an injustice. [08 Feb 1991, p.3F]

Sleeping With the Enemy is a flat tire of a movie. Looks good -- white sidewalls, crome spokes -- but it flaps and clunks and never gets to vroom. [18 Feb 1991, p.64B]

Because the opening scenes of Sleeping with the Enemy are so powerful, the rest of the movie is all the more disappointing. The film begins as an unyielding look at a battered wife, and ends as another one of those thrillers where the villain toys with his victim and the audience. Read full review

Generic abuser, generic victim, generic nice-guy-next-door, all going through highly predictable motions. [08 Feb 1991, p.21]

On paper, this sounded like a winner. In reality? We have met the Enemy at the multiplex, and he's silly. [08 Feb 1991, p.4D]

Dump thriller which trivialises the subject matter. Read full review