Synopsis/Details
Detective Owen Murphy has spent years navigating the dark side of Los Angeles. A veteran LAPD vice detective, husband, and father, he has learned to live with the compromises that come with the badge—and with the secrets that keep his two worlds from colliding. His marriage to Andie is deteriorating. His relationship with Ruby, a woman who offers him refuge from the pressures of his life, is the one place where he feels understood.
Then Ruby is murdered, and Murphy looks good for it.
When Murphy is summoned to a downtown rooftop crime scene and discovers that the victim is the woman he has been secretly seeing, his first instinct is to lie. He denies knowing her. But the lie quickly unravels, and suddenly the veteran detective finds himself on the wrong side of an investigation. Internal Affairs is closing in. His own department is questioning him. And the evidence pointing to his guilt is mounting.
Then Murphy nearly dies in a car accident.
In the hospital, he receives news that turns a bad night into a race against death: an inoperable mass on his brain stem has left him with a rare neurological disorder. If he falls asleep, his body will stop breathing. There is no treatment, no cure, and no guarantee he will survive another night.
Murphy walks out of the hospital knowing that his time is measured not in days or months—but in hours.
Now a fugitive from his own department, Murphy must stay awake long enough to solve Ruby’s murder and clear his name. Moving through the sleepless streets of Los Angeles, he follows the only lead that makes sense: the recently paroled trafficker he helped put behind bars. Murphy is convinced the man killed Ruby as an act of revenge.
But as exhaustion begins to distort his perceptions and his body starts to betray him, the investigation takes a darker turn. The killer may be closer than Murphy imagined. The evidence points not only toward the criminals he has spent his career pursuing, but toward the people he trusts—including his own partner and the family he has spent years taking for granted.
With dawn approaching and his ability to remain conscious slipping away, Murphy is forced to confront more than a killer. He must face the consequences of the lies, betrayals, and compromises that have defined his life.
•••
I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD is a relentless, atmospheric crime thriller built around a striking ticking-clock premise: a cop accused of murder who has only one sleepless stretch of Los Angeles night to solve the crime before sleep kills him. But beneath the suspense is a deeply human story about a man who has spent his life avoiding the truth—until death gives him no place left to hide.
Set against the nocturnal underbelly of Los Angeles, the screenplay combines the urgency of a police procedural with the psychological intensity of a noir thriller. At its center is a flawed detective racing not simply to survive, but to decide whether clearing his name is enough—or whether true justice requires him to finally take responsibility for the life he has made.
