Adam Cooper’s directing debut adapts E.O. Chirovici’s The Book of Mirrors and asks a retired homicide detective with Alzheimer’s to reopen a case he no longer remembers closing.

Sleeping Dogs gives Russell Crowe a detective who cannot rely on the one tool every detective needs: his own memory. Roy Freeman, a retired homicide investigator with Alzheimer’s disease, is asked to look again at a murder case he closed years earlier, and the files he wrote himself now read like the work of a stranger. Adam Cooper’s crime thriller, adapted from a widely translated novel by a Romanian writer, builds its whole mystery on that gap between what Roy did and what Roy can remember.

Released in the United States in March 2024, Sleeping Dogs is a 112-minute American-Australian production that marks the feature directing debut of Adam Cooper, a screenwriter with two decades of studio credits. Karen Gillan, Marton Csokas, Tommy Flanagan, Harry Greenwood and Thomas M. Wright complete the main cast, and the screenplay, by Cooper and his longtime writing partner Bill Collage, adapts The Book of Mirrors, the 2017 novel by E.O. Chirovici.

A cold case reopened by the man who forgot it

Roy Freeman is undergoing an experimental treatment meant to help him recover some of what the disease has taken. One day he gets a call from Emily Dietz (Kelly Greyson), an advocate for prison inmates, who asks him to visit Isaac Samuel (Pacharo Mzembe). Samuel is about to be executed for the murder of Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas), a university professor who studied the mind and memory, and he tells Roy that his confession was pressured out of him by Roy’s former partner, Detective Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan).

Roy goes back to his old notes and finds a loose end: a second suspect, Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), whose fingerprints were all over Wieder’s house, and whose records nobody seems to have checked. Before Roy can question him, Finn dies. At the funeral, Roy is handed a manuscript Finn had been writing about his time with Wieder and with Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), the student who was working with the professor on her thesis and who disappeared from view after the killing. From there the investigation becomes a reading exercise, a detective cross-checking someone else’s account against a past he can only recover in flashes.

From a novel of three voices to a one-man inquiry

E.O. Chirovici, born in Romania in 1964, published ten detective novels in his home country before moving to the United Kingdom and writing in English. The Book of Mirrors was his first English-language novel, and its publisher says it was translated into 37 languages, a rare international run for a crime book that leans on psychology rather than procedure.

The novel is built as a relay. A New York literary agent, Peter Katz, receives a partial manuscript from a former Princeton student, Richard Flynn, about his love for Laura Baines and his suspicion that she was involved with a famous professor, Joseph Wieder, who was later murdered. A freelance reporter, John Keller, then tries to reconstruct the case for a true-crime book and gives up. Only in the third part does the retired detective Roy Freeman, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, take up the inquiry, helped by a convict awaiting execution in Missouri.

The film flips that order. Roy is the protagonist from the first scene, the manuscript becomes a document he receives rather than the spine of the story, Flynn becomes Finn and the condemned prisoner becomes Isaac Samuel. On paper, the change trades a book about competing narrators for a film about a single unreliable one, and it moves the premise into a corner of the genre where Christopher Nolan‘s Memento and Phil Joanou’s Final Analysis already live: memory as evidence, and a psychiatrist’s office as a crime scene.

Two blockbuster screenwriters make a smaller film

Adam Cooper and Bill Collage have worked as a team since the mid-2000s. Their names are on the college comedy Accepted (2006), on Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), which they co-wrote with Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian, on The Transporter Refueled (2015), on The Divergent Series: Allegiant (2016), and they were hired in 2014 to rework the script of Assassin’s Creed. Most of that work served franchises and large studio machinery.

Sleeping Dogs is a different scale. Cooper directs, the pair co-produce alongside Mark Fasano of Nickel City Pictures and Pouya Shabazian, and Highland Film Group sold the film to international buyers before a frame was shot, including a deal with Signature Entertainment for the United Kingdom announced in November 2022. Crowe’s casting had been announced that August; Gillan, Csokas, Greenwood and Wright joined in February 2023, the same month principal photography began in Victoria, Australia. Shooting was based around Melbourne and wrapped in May.

The crew behind the camera is largely Australian and carries heavy credits. Ben Nott shot the film. The score is by David Hirschfelder, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Shine (1996) and for Elizabeth (1998) and who scored Baz Luhrmann‘s Strictly Ballroom. The editor, Matt Villa, shared an Oscar nomination for Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) and an AACTA Award for The Great Gatsby. For a mid-budget thriller, that is a seasoned team.

Russell Crowe, back on the detective beat

The role sends Russell Crowe back to two corners of his career. He played the volatile cop Bud White in L.A. Confidential (1997), and in A Beautiful Mind (2001) he played the mathematician John Nash, a man whose own mind turned against him. Roy Freeman sits between those two parts: a policeman, and a man whose brain is the least reliable witness in the case. It also fits the run of star-led genre films Crowe has chosen in recent years, from Unhinged (2020) to The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) and Land of Bad (2024).

There is a reunion in the cast as well. Tommy Flanagan, best known as Chibs in Sons of Anarchy, played Cicero, the loyal servant of Crowe’s Maximus, in Gladiator (2000); here he is the partner whose loyalty is precisely what the case puts in question. Karen Gillan, Amy Pond in Doctor Who and Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy, plays the researcher whose disappearance the whole plot is organized around. Marton Csokas, the Russian enforcer of The Equalizer, plays the murdered professor, and Thomas M. Wright, whose film as director, The Stranger, premiered at Cannes in 2022, appears in front of the camera as one of Wieder’s former patients.

A memory thriller that plays by the rules

The bet of Sleeping Dogs is not novelty. It is a classic psychological murder mystery that asks to be judged on how well it hides its answer: a closed circle of suspects, a manuscript that may or may not be honest, a dead man’s version of events, and an investigator who has to treat his own recollections as one more statement to verify. That is familiar ground, and the film arrives on it with a source novel already in readers’ hands in 37 languages.

Commercially, the film led a quiet life. The Avenue released it in American theatres on March 22, 2024, Rialto Distribution opened it in Australia that August, and its worldwide gross stands at about 2.1 million dollars, a modest theatrical figure. That is the usual fate now for a mid-budget adult thriller without a franchise behind it, and one reason so many of them pass unnoticed.

The title comes from the proverb that advises leaving sleeping dogs where they lie. Roy Freeman does the opposite, and the film’s real question is not who killed Joseph Wieder but what a man with a failing memory should do when the past he wakes up turns out to have his own fingerprints on it.

Tags: thrillers, Russell Crowe