“My name is Amy,” announces the main character of Sleeping Dogs Lie in an opening voice-over, “and yes, at college, I blew my dog.” Played with humor and gravity by Melinda Page Hamilton, Amy is a perceptive, down-to-earth woman who doesn’t consider herself a sexual deviate, just a person who did something stupid out of boredom or perhaps curiosity. “Immediately I was full of guilt, but at the same time, as disgusting as it was, another part of me kinda thought it was funny.” Now in her mid-20s, Amy has accepted an engagement ring from her boyfriend, John (Bryce Johnson), but when he challenges her to disclose her deepest, darkest secret, it turns out to be a little too deep and dark for him. Worse, this revelation occurs in the middle of a visit to meet her straitlaced parents, and after her meth-smoking brother, Dougie (Jack Plotnick), overhears the couple’s conversation, he blurts out Amy’s secret at the family dinner table.
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Played by Daryl Sabara, Kyle is crude, lascivious, hateful, controlling, verbally abusive, emotionally manipulative—a real monster. Early in the movie, Lance finds him hanging from a bathrobe sash that’s been knotted to his bedpost; after Lance frantically rescues the boy, Kyle protests, “I was coming, you fag!” For Kyle, anyone who shows the slightest trace of compassion or sensitivity is a “fag,” particularly his father, and women are especially worthy of contempt. “You have to know that fucking pussy is virgin shit,” he tells his only friend at school. “When I’m with a chick I go straight for the brown eye.” In fact, he’s never gotten any closer to a woman than his father has to a publisher. Roundly despised by his teachers and classmates, Kyle is the kind of person the world could easily do without, and when his father finds him strangling again—this time as dead as a doornail—his grief is magnified by the knowledge that almost no one will share it.
