Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me’ on Netflix, a Dull, Passionless Polish Rom-Dram

Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me (now on Netflix) is a Polish rom-dram so feather-light, an amoeba fart would rocket it to Jupiter. Director Robert Wichrowski’s movie is a story of a woman who has a man but isn’t satisfied by that man and ends up being satisfied by a different man, a man who previously satisfied her years before she met and married and had children with the first man. It is quite a conundrum! And then there’s a scene in which the second man utters the title of the movie, and there’s just no resisting the urge to commit the living bejeezus out of some infidelity. The question is, do we wanna watch? Or no?

TONIGHT YOU’RE SLEEPING WITH ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Life. It’s starting to get to Nina (Roma Gasiorowska). She has two cute and demanding young daughters; a husband, Maciek (Wojciech Zielinski), who’s a dud in a sharp suit; a career as a lifestyle journalist; and one of those large, spacious, ultramodern homes with meticulous landscaping and an interior decorating scheme that bans earth tones under penalty of death. Why, exactly, does all this feel like too much and not enough at the same time? THE ETERNAL QUESTION. 

Unlike the rest of us, Nina can actually answer that. One fateful day at the office, in walks Janek (Maciej Musial), her former lover. Not only does he now work at this publication, whatever it is, could be a magazine or a website or a newspaper, who knows, and not only is he in her department, but he’s now her assistant. In flashbacks, we see them smooching and such, but obviously it didn’t last. He’s younger than her, a length that can be counted in years, because he’s referred to as a “younger guy,” although quite how many years remains unspecified. How did their affair end? Dunno. This movie isn’t big on details, see. But their relationship clearly went kaputskies with a lot of wick left on the candle – enough to maybe make them act upon their yearning, especially since their new “journalism” “project” is about “the body” and requires them to talk about “the body” a lot, which might be hawwt if this script wasn’t so damn vague and dumb.

Meanwhile, Maciek suddenly decides to go on a solo hiking vacay in Iceland for a month, which cheeses off Nina, because now she has to take care of the girls and grind the edges of every corner in the house so they maintain their razor-sharp ultramodernness all by herself. And considering the earlier scene that established Maciek as the least romantic sex-haver in the history of commingling, Nina is across-the-board discontent. Then one of the girls gets sick and Maciek took the first aid kit with him and now she doesn’t have any medicine and can’t leave the house, so Janek swoops to the rescue, with tousled hair and rakish earring and toned, waxed chest and bagful of medicine and candy. Oh boy. I do believe this is an opportunity for some sweet, sweet extramarital lovin’.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: TYSWM isn’t quite as odious as the movies I’m about to invoke, but it’s kinda like The Room crossed with 365 Days (a.k.a. The Polish 50 Shades of Grey), minus the gratuitous sex scenes and incidents of violence and/or football-tossing.

Performance Worth Watching: [THIS SECTION LEFT BLANK – FOR ADMINISTRATIVE USE ONLY] 

Memorable Dialogue: Nina to Janek: “You start with the body, and end up in the Bermuda Triangle of body, mind and love.”

Sex and Skin: A couple of tepid sex scenes with male and female toplessness.

Our Take: Call the power company, Maw – this love shack got no electricity. In fact, I’m not sure it’s wired up properly, if at all, and it’s not really a shack either, more of a two-sided tent with a pole made out of stretched-out Silly Putty, just ready to fall down and leave us cold, laying on damp moss and worm excreta. Where was I? Right: Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me is a bad movie! It sets up a rudimentary melodramatic situation and executes it in a dull, passionless manner. It’s ineptly written and edited, a collection of awkward and repetitive scenes culled from a screenplay so threadbare, it’s like handing us three strands of filament and insisting it’s a blanket. I will give it this: Sometimes, it’s unintentionally hilarious.

The core arc is Nina’s dilemma: Maciek is a well-meaning fella, a cold fish with nary a hair out of place; his “style” is sleek and silvery like a late-model Beemer. Janek is a romantic, and by the looks of things, doesn’t own a comb; his “style” is homey, like a set of brown bookshelves cluttered with old classics. A real Sophie’s Choice situation here. It’s clear that Nina is one of the archetypal Women Who Wants To Have It All But Ends Up Struggling With All Of It, but that’s the beginning and end of her character. She mopes and vacillates and stares into her manicured backyard, and behind her bewildered discontent, a tumbleweed rolls on by, aimlessly navigating a vast, empty space where, in a movie that was actually written instead of haphazardly stapled together out of vapid cliches, character and subtext might normally reside. When Nina and Janek hook up, it’s supposed to generate some heat, but their sexual energy is less bacon sizzling in cast iron, more last night’s dishrag, wadded up and sopped in the bottom of the sink. 

Our Call: Tonight You’re Sleeping With Me? Sorry, but Tonight You’re Bookkeeping With Me would be more exciting. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.