The biggest issues in Trouble Sleeping begin with the script. It’s a movie filled with largely unlikable, pointlessly devious characters. As the layers of each character is peeled away and their past and true motivations are revealed, they become more unlikable. It makes it difficult to care about any of them or any of the actions that drive the story forward. Having at least one person to latch on to perhaps would have remedied this. That person could have potentially been Charles (Billy Zane),  but he’s dead when the movie opens and we only get brief glimpses of him in a couple of flashbacks.

Trouble Sleeping centers on Vanessa’s (Vanessa Angel) life after her prominent psychologist husband Charles commits suicide. She’s having a recurring dream in which her deceased husband appears playing the piano next to her. The emergence of the dream seems to stem from the fact that Vanessa’s stepson, Justin (Kale Clauson), will soon be released from the mental health institution he has been in since discovering his father’s body post suicide.

Vanessa and her new husband, Alex (Rick Otto) have torn through the money that Charles left Vanessa. Justin stands to inherit twenty million dollars in ten days, and his step-parents have designs on that money. Things further complicate when August (Ingrid Eskeland-Adetuyi) shows up at the invitation of Alex to write a biography about Charles. Various twists, turns, double-dealings, and betrayals ensue over the next hour and a half. 

Another weak point in the script is the dialogue around mental health. Justin’s doctor, Dr. Gilbert, is alarmingly blasé about some of Justin’s actions. At one point, Dr. Gilbert compares Justin’s behaviors to a dog who needs to pee all over the carpet. The movie is filled with ham-fisted conversations about psychology. Multiple characters are meant to have a background or some experience in this field, and the depiction of this feels less than authentic at best, and borderline irresponsible at worst. More care and research perhaps could have gone into the depiction of these conversations and attitudes. 

The actors do well enough with the material they are given. Kale Clauson, as Justin, gives a watchable performance as the wild card stepson. His actions and thoughts are largely unpredictable, which makes him one of the interesting characters in the movie. Ingrid Eskeland-Adetuyi turns in a coy, quietly flirty performance that makes the scenes she’s in interesting. A lot of the difficulty here again, doesn’t lie with the actors themselves but what the script gives them to work with. 

Trouble Sleeping relies heavily on double-dealings, twists, and hidden relationships in lieu of telling a compelling story or creating fully fleshed-out characters. The setup for it is great: a stepmother petrified of her stepson returning home after years spent in a mental health hospital. What we get from that premise is long, seemingly ill-informed conversations about mental health and surprise reveals that aren’t all that surprising. Instead of a psychological thriller, Trouble Sleeping is mostly a shallow melodrama. 

2 out of 10