'Sleeping Beauty' offers sexually supercharged role for 'Sucker Punch' star Emily Browning

Julia Leigh is a first time filmmaker, but you'd never know it from the confidence that is on display in each and every frame of her film "Sleeping Beauty."

There are few tricks more difficult in filmmaking than tackling the subject of sexuality on film in a frank and adult way without making something that is, for lack of a better term, pornographic, and yet it seems like one of the things that serious filmmakers attempt every so often, and that has baffled even some of our very best. For someone to make their debut with a movie that digs into onscreen eroticism and that attempts to do so in an intriguing, almost clinical manner is genuinely daring, and it is impressive how close Leigh comes to pulling it off.

Even tougher is making a film with a passive protagonist, but that's the entire point of this film. Lucy (Emily Browning) moves through life as if she's watching it on TV, disconnected from almost everything she does in her daily life. She works a handful of jobs while going to college, and as we watch her deal with the details of her day -- washing tables, submitting to a repeated experiment for cash, copying and collating papers -- she is barely there. Even when she goes out to bars looking for empty sexual encounters, she lets things happen. She leaves her fate up to a coin toss. The only person she seems to have any real connection to is a young man named Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) who is in the final stages of some unnamed fatal illness, and it's obvious it takes a huge emotional toll on her each time she sees him.

She stumbles into a new job that skirts the line of being prostitution, involving her dressing up in revealing lingerie to serve drinks at private parties, and Leigh begins to tease the audience even as she tests Lucy. Where is her personal line? What is too much for her to consider? Where will she stop once she starts down this path? Her employer, Clara (Rachael Blake), offers her a new job, and this is where the movie takes a left turn into a genuinely unexplored area on film, the ultimate version of a passive sexual encounter. Lucy agrees to let herself be drugged so that she slips into a deep sleep, so deep that even striking her won't rouse her, with the only rule being that the men who pay for her company in that condition are not allowed to penetrate her. Short of that, anything goes.