Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
and the Escape That Ends in Another Man's Arms
The film that showed a generation what coercive control looks like, down to the towels. It also taught that abuse looks like a monster, that leaving means dying, and that the reward for getting out is the next man.
Sleeping with the Enemy (1991). Directed by Joseph Ruben, from Nancy Price’s 1987 novel. Julia Roberts as Laura, Patrick Bergin as Martin, Kevin Anderson as Ben.
If you are living with someone like Martin, leaving is a plan, not a moment, and you do not have to make it alone. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. They help with safety planning, and they will not tell you what to do. Every current number is on the Resources page. If you are in danger right now, call 911.
This page belongs to On Screen, where Martin Burney already stands as a portrait of control. The earlier pieces in this series, Mannequin and Weird Science, read films that taught their lessons disguised as love. This one is different. Sleeping with the Enemy knows exactly who the villain is. It is worth reading anyway, because a film can name the pattern and still teach something beside it.
The Story
From the outside, Laura Burney has a perfect life: a beautiful house on Cape Cod and a charming, successful husband. Inside the house, Martin is obsessive and controlling. He has abused her physically, emotionally and sexually for nearly four years, and after each time he apologizes with flowers and gifts. The towels have to hang perfectly straight. The cans in the cupboard have to face forward, in rows.
Martin believes Laura is afraid of water and cannot swim. She has been learning in secret. When a storm hits during an evening sail, she goes overboard and is presumed drowned. She swims to shore, cuts her hair, puts on a wig, flushes her wedding ring down the toilet, collects the money and belongings she has hidden, and takes a bus to Cedar Falls, Iowa. She had told Martin her mother was dead. She had actually moved her mother to a nursing home there.
As “Sara Waters,” she rents a house and finds a job. Her neighbor, Ben, a drama teacher at the local college, is drawn to her. On an early date, when a kiss turns more physical, she tells him to leave, and later she tells him the truth. In the film’s lightest sequence, set to “Brown Eyed Girl,” she tries on wigs, hats and dresses in his theater department’s costume room.
The ring did not flush. Martin finds it, learns about the swimming lessons, and tracks her through her mother. He lets himself into her new house and lines up the towels and the cans. He knocks Ben unconscious. Laura gets his gun, calls the police, and tells them she has killed an intruder. Then she shoots him. The film ends with Laura and Ben holding each other, waiting for the police.
What It Gets Right
This film deserves real credit, and much of what it shows is still rarer on screen than it should be.
- Control lives in small things. The towels and the cans are the most remembered images in the film, and they are exactly right. Coercive control is built out of rules about ordinary objects, enforced until the rules run your whole day.
- The cycle. Abuse, then flowers and gifts, then calm, then abuse again. The Glossary calls this the Cycle of Violence, and the film shows it without softening it.
- The perfect life from the outside. Nobody looking at the Burneys’ house would have guessed. That is how it usually looks.
- Leaving is the dangerous part. Martin comes after her once she is gone, not while she stays. Domestic violence advocates warn about exactly this: the time around leaving is often when the risk is highest.
- She plans. The secret swimming lessons, the hidden money, the mother moved in advance. Laura’s escape is careful and long, and it is hers.
What It Still Teaches
1. Abuse looks like a monster
Martin is filmed like the villain of a horror movie: the stalking, the break-in, the final attack. Roger Ebert called the film “a slasher movie in disguise.” That framing makes him unforgettable, and it also makes him rare. A girl watching learns that abuse announces itself with dread music and a man who is obviously terrifying.
Most control arrives charming. It looks like a man who is a little particular, who likes things a certain way, who loves you so much he needs to know where you are. The towels were the true detail in this film. The horror movie around them made them easy to mistake for something that only happens in horror movies.
2. Getting out means disappearing
Laura has to die to leave. She fakes her drowning, changes her name, hides her hair, tells her husband her own mother is dead, and starts over in a state where nobody knows her. The film is honest about how high the cost of leaving can be.
What it cannot show is any other door. There is no advocate, no friend who knows, no hotline, no protective order, no one at all. The lesson that lands is that escape is a solo stunt: you get out alone and in secret, or you do not get out. Real exits are usually planned with help, and the help exists. Its number is at the top of this page.
3. The next man is the reward
Within the film’s story, not long after Laura arrives in Iowa, a kind man lives next door. Ben is a good man, and the film takes care to show it: he backs off when she tells him to leave, and he listens when she tells him the truth. Nothing here is about him.
It is about what the film thinks recovery looks like. Laura’s new life is shown mostly through her new romance. And its brightest scene is the one critics compared to the Pretty Woman shopping montage: she tries on costumes, hats and wigs in his costume room, playing dress-up for an audience of one man, to “Brown Eyed Girl.” After everything, the picture of her freedom is a woman being delighted in while she is dressed and redressed.
This is the same lesson Mannequin called her escape is another man. Laura leaves one man’s house and her story is told through the next man’s attention. The film never imagines a version where she heals first, alone, and chooses later.
4. It is only over when he is dead
The film’s ending is its most famous refusal. For years, Laura asked the police to protect her. This time she calls them and tells them she has killed an intruder, and then she does it. That moment is powerful, and a lot of women cheered it.
It also teaches that the story ends only one way: he has to die. In real life most women who leave do not get an ending like that, and do not want one. Their endings are quieter: distance, paperwork, a safety plan, a new routine, the slow return of their own nervous system. Those endings are real endings, even with no gunshot in them.
The Series So Far
| Mannequin (1987) | Weird Science (1985) | Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does the film see the man clearly? | No: he is the hero | No: they are the heroes | Yes: he is the villain |
| Who dresses her | Jonathan, for the window | The boys’ wishes, from the start | Herself, in Ben’s costume room, for him |
| Her way out | Waiting, frozen, for the right man | Disappearing once they are done | Dying on paper, then the next man |
| How it ends | She is real as his reward | She vanishes, then starts again | He is dead, and she is in another man’s arms |
Even the film that names the villain could not picture a woman whose new life belonged to her first.
If You Grew Up on This
For many women this was the first time they saw what was happening at home on a screen. If this film helped you name it, it did something important, and nothing on this page takes that back.
Some questions to sit with:
- What are your “towels”? The small rules you still follow for someone who is no longer watching?
- Who would you tell, if you were planning to leave? If the answer is “no one,” that is the first thing a safety plan can change.
- What does your life look like with no one new in it yet? What is in it that is only yours?
- What would a quiet ending look like for you, one with no gunshot and no rescue?
Laura’s best decision was made long before the storm: she learned to swim in secret. The strength was hers before Ben, and before the gun. So is yours.
You’re the audience now. You can see the whole house.
Related: Weird Science → · Mannequin → · Resources →