'Before I Go to Sleep:' Bring no doze

"Before I Go to Sleep" describes the portion of the movie you'll be able to endure before Nicole Kidman's eyes well up for the 40th time, and the yawns commence.

No one does high-strung tremulous victim better than Kidman, but a little goes a long way in "Sleep," Rowan Joffe's adaptation of S.J. Watson's popular novel.

It's a sort of Brit version of "Gone Girl," with a dash of "Memento." Nicole is Christine, a housewife who each morning wakes up with no memory and must reconstruct her past anew.

Assisting her is affable husband Ben (Colin Firth), but she's also getting mysterious phone calls from a neuropsychiatrist (Mark Strong) who wants to help her recover her memory independent of Ben's help.

Christine learns that Ben is hiding things from her, but his protective explanations make sense: There are some things too painful to remember, memories too traumatic to be recovered and dealt with in a day.

Of course, he could also be full of beans. So could the apparently helpful but slightly sinister psychiatrist. Strong specializes in playing villains, even brags about it in his Jaguar commercials.

Firth, on the other hand, has been shorthand for ideal mate since he played Mr. Darcy on the BBC two decades ago.

The narrative raises questions, but so does the casting. Would Firth want to play his umpteenth nice husband yet again? Would Strong want to play another heavy?

The ending left me unsurprised, the story left me unconvinced. Christine is conveniently bereft of friends and family, and seems not to remember the Internet.

Each day she cobbles together some pastiche of her purported identity with audio blogs and photos of herself. That's what Facebook is for.