Sleepless Society: Insomnia Review

Insomnia (2019) was the first one of the Sleepless Society: The Series miniseries that I watched. In fact, I binge-watched it. As someone who sometimes suffers from insomnia and occasionally has vivid nightmares, this sounded like a very interesting premise. This isn’t going to be an episode-by-episode review, and I’m not going to go over every little detail. However, there will be SPOILERS.

Iya suffers from insomnia, which makes it difficult for her to distinguish between dreams and reality. She also has a recurring dream of her mother killing someone, which may be a real memory. Years ago, Iya’s father was murdered along with one of Iya’s teachers, Toon, and her mother disappeared. Everyone believes Iya’s mother killed her husband after she found out he was having an affair with Toon, and then escaped to the mainland. Iya doesn’t remember what happened that night. At the advice of her therapist, she returns to the island where it all took place. People aren’t happy that Iya is back, much less that she’s digging up the past. Some of her old childhood friends – Faye, Win, Suea, Yok – begin to help her piece together what really happened.

Soon, however, it becomes clear that people on the island have something to hide, including her friends’ parents. Since Win’s father is the community leader, and Faye’s father is the chief of police, Iya must be careful. This also creates mixed loyalties and makes her uncertain of whether she can trust her closest allies. Even Tippy, the aunt who took her in, acts suspiciously. Iya’s condition also makes her a very unreliable witness, especially since not even she knows whether she can believe her own eyes. To keep track of what’s real and what’s not, she carves lines on her wooden keyholder, and the show does a good job of keeping the viewers guessing along with her whether a particular scene did happen until she checks the keyholder.

Insomnia presents a good number of suspects and plausible scenarios. Someone could be off the list of suspects in one moment and then end up back there when more information appears and a new motive is uncovered.

After some misdirection and a considerable number of twists – the greater of all four miniseries –, we finally get to the truth, or at least part of it. Iya’s mother had been protesting against the building of a resort on protected land but realized she had been lied to about the environmental costs and stopped the protest. She then began investigating and found out the protected land was being used by human traffickers and that the fathers of Win and Faye were involved. Her evidence was destroyed, but Toon, who was actually having an affair with Win’s father, copied some damning information to a pen drive. The search for this pen drive is what moves much of the plot. After a man posing as a school inspector tried to steal it, Toon hid it in a temple and used Iya’s homework to give instructions to her mother on where to find it. This all happened the day of the murders. It was Iya who found the drive and hid it in a library book while being chased by a man working for Win’s father. This same man had fought with the fake inspector, so there’s more than one group looking for the drive. After hiding it, Iya hits her head, which explains the memory loss.

The fact that Iya was the last person who had the pen drive leads to the craziest twist in the entire Sleepless Society series: Tippy isn’t really Tippy, but a former assistant who accidently killed her around the same time the murders happened and was then convinced by Win’s father to undergo plastic surgery to take her place and keep an eye on Iya!

In another surprising, though noncrazy, twist, the pen drive turns out to be broken and the evidence is gone. Iya and her friends kidnap Win’s and Faye’s respective fathers so they can force them to confess to the human trafficking and the murders. This plan has twists and counter-twists:

- Iya doesn’t trust Win, so she and the others secretly come up with a different plan so they can use his loyalty to his father against him. Since Win warns his father and offers to call his men to come help him, he ends up confessing things he otherwise wouldn’t have while Yok secretly films everything.

- But because both he and Faye’s father were being threatened, all they have to do is tell the police they were just telling Iya what she wanted to hear to make the recordings worthless.

- However, when Win’s father is arrested, because he fully trusted his son thanks to his betrayal of his friends, he gives him the password to his computer. And so, Win can access all the information about the trafficking, copy it into another pen drive, and, along with his mother, hand it over to the police.

Whew, that was twisty! And possibly unnecessary, since the police went to the house and accessed the computer themselves. Still, I liked it. I also liked that they didn’t turn Win into a traitor and an accomplice to human trafficking.

Another thing I liked was that the show didn’t try to use the abuse suffered as children by Win’s and Faye’s respective fathers as a way to minimize what they did as adults. Faye, whose father raped her the night of the murders, doesn't show an ounce of pity and is furious that he passed on his suffering to her - no amount of trauma can justify what he did.

Since I mentioned Faye, I have to say that I found her story just too much. It’s bad enough that she’s a victim of abuse, but then the show makes her mother also a rape victim and her daughter a result of that rape. This was unnecessary and added nothing to a story that already had plenty of awful things happening.

On a lighter note, I liked how the show handled Iya/Win/Mo. When I saw that Win still had a thing for Iya, though he had brought his girlfriend, Mo, home to meet his parents, I worried this might turn into a love triangle. If it had been an American TV show, that’s probably what would’ve happened, and either Win or Mo would have become a complete jerk. Thankfully, Insomnia didn’t go there. Instead, Mo gets to befriend Iya and join her and the others in investigating the past.

In the end, the real murderer, who also framed Iya’s mother, turns out to be the fake school inspector who was really a hitman sent by one of the criminal organizations wanting to profit from the island. This means the greater forces behind what happened in the past remain unseen. Normally, I don’t like this kind of resolution, I’d rather the culprit be someone we already know, but here I didn’t mind. Probably because there were enough bad guy characters that we do get to know.

Insomnia’s ending begins on a happy note and slowly peels back the thin layer of bliss to reveal the darkness underneath. Even though Iya and her friends solved the murder, cleared her mother’s name, and exposed a human trafficking network, it’s clear things won’t change much because there will always be more criminal organizations wanting to use the island and more islanders, like Win’s mother, willing to help them. And there will also always be people like Toon’s journalist sister who are willing to ally with those same criminals to get what they want without caring about the consequences.

It’s clear the show is trying to make a greater point about corruption and some of the dialogue is a bit too heavy-handed, but at least the story is good. I wouldn’t have minded if it had ended on a happier note, but I thought the bittersweet ending made the show as a whole better.

By Wilcox