Sleepwalking in Suburbia is a 2017 Lifetime Movie of the Week Medical Drama/Psychological Thriller, directed by Alex Wright and co-written by Wright and Bryce Doersam.
Michelle Miller (Emilie Ullerup) is a Seattle advertising executive who lives in an upscale neighborhood with her architect husband Dan (Giles Panton). Their lives get disrupted when Michelle comes down with a case of sleepwalking that includes "sexsomnia", a condition where the sleepwalker engages in carnal impulses during REM sleep. During one episode she has a sexual tryst with her neighbor Luke (Carlo Marks), whose marriage to Nancy (Lucie Guest) has gotten very rocky. Luke, unaware that Michelle wasn't conscious when they had sex, tries to pursue her, but she denies anything ever happened between them and rejects his advances, which leaves him frustrated. Another neighboring couple, Kate (Miranda Frigon) and Tyler (Ryan Williams) tries to help Michelle cope with her problems. But when her life gets threatened, Michelle starts to suspect that Luke may be trying to kill her. She turns out to be horrifyingly wrong.
The film got an unusual Crossover-based sequel in 2019 when Lifetime brought back Ullerup to play Michelle Miller in the fourth Stalked By My Doctor movie, A Sleepwalker's Nightmare.
Sleepwalking in Suburbia contains examples of:
- Alas, Poor Villain: Luke was kind of a hotheaded jerk who seemed to be causing much of the trouble in his marriage, and he more-or-less sexually assaults Michelle when he tries to get her to remember what happened the night they had their fling, but his underlying motives were sympathetic and he certainly didn't deserve the gruesome stabbing death he suffered at the hands of Dan.
- The Alcoholic:
- Nancy drinks quite a bit, even though she's supposed to abstain from alcohol while taking the medication she's been placed on.
- It's also implied that Luke is a big drinker.
- Artistic License – Medicine: Sexsomnia is real, and does in fact occur often in tandem with sleepwalking, but it generally affects men more than women, and women who have it tend to engage more in masturbation rather than intercourse.
- Awful Wedded Life:
- Luke and Nancy are constantly at each other's throats. It's the unhappiness of the marriage that makes Luke receptive to Michelle's sexsomnia.
- Dan and Michelle are outwardly happy, but it's clear that their attempts to have a child are starting to strain things. Then it all goes to Hell when Dan decides that Michelle is having an affair with Luke.
- Beta Couple: Kate and Tyler are the happy, functional couple, compared with somewhat troubled Dan and Michelle, and outright toxic Luke and Nancy.
- Car Fu: Michelle sleepwalks to a nearby gas station and almost gets run over by a truck. Then the driver tries to shoot her.
- Conspicuous Gloves: At the climax Dan wears these to avoid having his fingerprints on the gun he's planning to use to kill Michelle.
- Convenient Miscarriage: Michelle miscarried in her first attempt to have a child with Dan. She gets pregnant again, but Luke might be the father. The physical and mental stress she goes through in the climax could well lead to another miscarriage, and her comments in Stalked By My Doctor: A Sleepwalker's Nightmare imply that it indeed happened.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Unexpectedly, Dan turns out to be this, which sheds a whole new light on when he told the police detective "Everybody loves my wife."
- Deadpan Snarker: Tyler keeps making somewhat insensitive quips about Michelle and her sleepwalking.
- Dude, She's Like in a Coma: Zig-zagged, since we know that Michelle is deep in REM sleep when she has sex with Luke, but he doesn't.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The movie is about a suburban woman who sleepwalks.
- Experimented in College: Tyler alludes to this in his wisecrack about the incident when Michelle wakes up in his bed.Tyler: You know, I've never had two women in my bed before. Kate did all the experimenting in college.Kate: Oh, shut up!
- Face–Heel Turn: Dan becomes a Crazy Jealous Guy who thinks Michelle and Luke are having an affair and kills Luke, and also plans to kill Michelle.
- Frame-Up: Dan leads Michelle to Luke's house while she sleepwalks, then kills Luke and plants the knife on Michelle, so that when she wakes up she'll think she killed him herself.
- Gambit Pileup: The final scenes have two competing conspiracies going on, both based on the false assumption that Michelle was having an affair with Luke—Dan murdered Luke, then tried to make it look like Michelle did it, and Nancy also wants to kill Michelle.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot/A Threesome Is Hot: In her second sexsomnia episode, Michelle walks over to Kate and Tyler's house, slips inside the back door, then crawls into bed next to Kate. She and the deep-sleeping Kate start kissing each other passionately, as a sleeping Tyler slides up to them. It ends when Kate suddenly wakes up and is shocked by what's going on.
- Halfway Plot Switch: It starts off as a Medical Drama about sexsomnia, then turns into a Thriller about a woman being pursued by her stalker neighbor, then ends up as a Horror story about a husband trying to kill his wife.
- Hotter and Sexier: A prime example of a Lifetime movie that's just a couple of nude scenes away from being a Cinemax After Dark movie. The Michelle/Kate kissing scene is definitely one of the all-time raciest Lifetime movie moments.
- Jump Scare: The knife blade plunging through the door as Michelle is hiding from Nancy.
- Killing in Self-Defense: Michelle at the climax, with Dan (and probably Nancy) on the receiving end.
- Kinky Cuffs: Luke suggests to Dan that he uses handcuffs to restrain Michelle to the bed so she won't sleepwalk, and seems to intend it as a sly reference to this, though Dan later gets cuffs for real for this purpose.
- Kiss-Kiss-Slap: Luke and Nancy seem to be passionate for one another, but then turn around and fight, making them a blatantly unhealthy couple who, as discussed on the I Love a Lifetime Movie podcast, have a marriage with some faint hints of a swinger/BDSM component.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Michelle has a Surprise Pregnancy, but she's not sure if the baby is Dan's or Luke's.
- Mind-Control Eyes: Michelle suddenly opens her eyes when she wakes up and crawls out of bed, then as she sleepwalks, she keeps her eyes open without blinking and wears a blank expression on her face.
- Mr. Exposition:
- Dr. Thorston at the sleep clinic. His only reason for being in the movie is to explain what sexsomnia is.
- Kate, a psychologist, is on hand to elucidate on the mental health side of Michelle's problems.
- Ms. Fanservice: Michelle is a beautiful blonde who looks really good walking around hypnotically in a silky teddy.
- Never Wake Up a Sleepwalker: Michelle punches both Dan and Tyler across the face when they try to wake her up.
- Questionable Consent: In the sleepwalking sex episode, Michelle more-or-less initiates things, but she never speaks and has Mind-Control Eyes, so you can argue that Luke on a certain level recognized that she wasn't fully conscious but went ahead with the intercourse, pushing him way over into the grey area between consensual and nonconsensual sex. His groping of her in the later hallway incident also goes in this direction.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Detective Bennett is surprisingly competent for a law enforcement figure in a Lifetime movie. He's a bit skeptical of the sexsomnia stuff, but duly investigates the leads Michelle and Dan give him, and even manages to contact Nancy after she seems to disappear following her separation from Luke. He only arrests Michelle because the evidence seems to point to her before we learn about Dan's Frame-Up scheme.
- Red Herring: Three big ones in the story.
- Luke has turned into a disturbed Stalker with a Crush on Michelle, so when her life is threatened he's the natural first choice for the culprit. It was actually Dan.
- It looks for all the world like Michelle killed Luke while she was sleepwalking, but it was actually Dan who did it and tried to frame her.
- Nancy at first seems to have been murdered by Luke, but is found alive and well. Then she returns and appears to be the Big Bad, targeting Michelle because she feels Michelle broke up her marriage, before Dan's ultimate confession.
- The Reveal: At the climax Dan confesses his whole murder plot to Michelle.
- Sacrificial Lion: Luke ends up dead, but it takes a while to clear up who did it. It was Dan.
- Sarcastic Confession: Michelle lies in the form of this and tells Dan that she was faking her sleepwalking, to make him jealous of Luke.
- Sleepwalking: Michelle's case is particularly bad, since she actually manages to leave the house and trespass into other people's houses.
- Stalker with a Crush: Luke for Michelle, though there's an extra added wrinkle that they've already hooked up sexually, but she can't remember it.
- Stepford Suburbia: The title might make you think this is a story about this subject, until you learn that the "sleepwalking" part is quite literal, but it still emerges as a theme, as it centers on two pairs of workaholic white collar professionals in unhappy marriages who try to put up a front.
- Tragic Dream: Luke has been in unrequited love with his married neighbor Michelle for 10 years, which is frustrating enough for him. When she drops by his house and has sex with him, it fulfills all of his dreams and he becomes obsessed with her, convinced that she really loves him. But he doesn't realize that she was asleep the whole time, and his forceful attempts to start a relationship just turn her off more.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Luke's offhand suggestion that Dan handcuff Michelle to the bed inspires Dan to try it for real, and he uses it as the centerpiece of a plot to murder Luke himself.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We never find out for certain if Michelle killed Nancy or just knocked her unconscious.
- Zombie Gait: Michelle's pace when she sleepwalks is slow and a bit clumsy, and has shades of this.
