Director: Adam Cooper
A retired detective with a fading memory takes on one last case — and finds out the past doesn't stay buried.
What is Sleeping Dogs about?
Roy Freeman is a former Los Angeles homicide detective whose memory has started slipping, thanks to a degenerative condition that erases pieces of his life without warning. When a convicted killer is granted a shot at exoneration, Roy is pulled back into a decade-old murder case he thought was closed for good. As he retraces old leads with a memory he can no longer fully trust, the investigation uncovers connections to his own past that he had either forgotten or buried on purpose. Based on E.O. Chirovici's novel "The Book of Mirrors," the story moves between timelines, letting the audience piece together a case at roughly the same pace as its unreliable narrator. What starts as a straightforward wrongful-conviction inquiry slowly turns into something far more personal, with each new witness statement forcing Roy to question what he actually knows about the people closest to him.
Cast & crew
Russell Crowe carries the film as Roy Freeman, playing a man whose confidence in his own recall erodes scene by scene. Karen Gillan and Marton Csokas fill out key roles in the present-day investigation, while Tommy Flanagan and Thomas M. Wright appear in threads connected to the original crime.
Context & significance
Adam Cooper, making his feature directorial debut here after a long career as a screenwriter, structures the film around fractured chronology rather than a straight linear timeline. The approach mirrors the source novel's own layered narration and keeps the mystery's central twist from landing until the final act, a choice that rewards close attention to earlier scenes.
Where & how to watch
Sleeping Dogs streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles available, so viewers can follow the twisting timeline in whichever language suits them best. This page can be read by anyone, but watching the film itself requires a K-Time account login, with a fully Farsi-language interface for Persian-speaking audiences.