After being robbed, attacked, and left for dead one night in Kuala Lumpur, Hsiao-kang, a homeless Chinese man is rescued and taken in by some Bangladeshi workers. One of them, Rawang, an immigrant worker, who lives in the shell of a modernist building abandoned during construction, nurses him, and lets him sleep beside him on an old mattress that he had found on the street. Rawang`s feelings for his patient may or may not be sexual, but there's definitely something like lust in the eyes of Chyi, a waitress in a run-down old coffee shop, when they light upon the recovering Hsiao Kang. As Hsiao-kang slowly recovers, he finds himself caught between Rawang and Chyi and so a triangle forms as a blanket of noxious fog settles on the city and everyone has trouble breathing. Simultaneously erotic and comical, the film underpins director Tsai`s deadpan allegory with hints of social realism.

Shooting for the first time in Malaysia after seven features set primarily in Taipei, director Tsai Ming-Liang returns to his birthplace with a film unlike any of his prior works. Different in texture, mood and feel, and featuring a cast of multi-cultural and multi-lingual characters, the vivid, crowded, neon-lit streets of Kuala Lumpur come alive as only master director Tsai Ming-Liang can capture... As with most of Tsai's films, actor Lee Kang-Sheng is featured, this time in dual roles as both a homeless bum and a paralyzed young man.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone was one of seven films commissioned for the Wiener Mozart New Crowned Hope Festival, Vienna 2006.