Sleeping Dogs (2024) Movie Review - Unreliable Narrator: Exploring Memory and Perception

The film is about an ex-homicide detective named Roy who suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease and is uncovering a case that he worked on long ago. He is called upon to look back into the case by a woman from an advocacy group that seeks to exonerate a person on death row for the crime.  

The pacing is slow, but if you like the actors, which I do (Russell Crowe and Karen Gillan are great, as are the other actors), it is fairly interesting. Now I’m being honest. You could easily turn it off or lose interest if you're the must-have-fast-action kind of person. I tend to give movies more time when they offer me an appealing protagonist or a premise that warrants examination. Towards the latter half, the film becomes more engrossing. But I had one major issue, which I’ll discuss under the spoilers section.

Roy is on a special experimental treatment where part of his therapy is to work on puzzles and do mental tasks to stimulate his memory. The backstory is endearing and poignant, as I wanted to learn more about how Roy became this way. Makes you think about the challenges and heartaches that people with memory loss encounter.

As Roy examines the case and sees the sloppiness of the work done by himself and a fellow cop, he delves deeper into the mysterious deaths of people associated with this murder case of a popular professor by the death-row inmate.

My major qualm of the movie was the plot became convoluted and complex with the professor’s and Laura's work coming into play. But when you get to the end, you see that it isn’t. Roy’s memory condition is what makes the case overly complex. At the end, you should see events as they really were.

My rating: Four and a half stars. The film contains violence, adult themes, foul language, sex scenes—so it should not be for those under 17 years.

I’d recommend this movie for people who like crime detective drama and mysteries on the slow-burn scale without brainless action—more of a character study of what can happen to a cop who really doesn’t remember details and is resigned to live an unfulfilling life after bad events happened to him. The movie is well-acted, contains great dialogue, and believable characters. I have a feeling most people would be aware of some, if not all, of the twists at the end.

Spoiler Alert

One issue I had was that Roy asked his buddy cop if he was a decent cop back in the day, when he could remember well. His friend said he was one of the best. Now, if Roy is a sharp detective, he would know what his wife looks like from photos and other mementos that are in your daily life at home or in photo albums, even if she has passed away long ago—because he would see her picture.

For some odd reason, his memory would not fill in the holes here. Until at the very end, his mind snaps into place because he has one wedding photo that he uncovers and reveals what she looks like. But wouldn’t he have other photos of her on social media or some other keepsake of her being his wife laying around the house?

I may be missing a detail of the movie here that may explain this other than thinking that Roy wanted to forget what she looked like. As a good cop, he would investigate this dead woman, finding some details of her name, do some web searches, and realize that she was his wife, even with no mental recollection of her as his wife. Knowing her identity would soon reveal to him the details of the professor’s true killer.