Disappointing Awake enough to send you to sleep
Awake (16+, 97 mins) Directed by Mark Raso Reviewed by James Croot ★★
‘I’m doing everything I can to get you guys back.’’ Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez) is determined to keep that promise to her two children. The former soldier has relinquished custody of Noah (Lucius Hoyos) and Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) to their grandmother (Frances Fisher), while she battles the effects of what she witnessed in the past.
But with security nightshifts at a medical facility not providing her with enough to make ends meet, Jill has also been using the access that affords her to purloin and sell expired pills for extra cash. It’s while freshly laden down with a wad of bills that she arrives to pick up her two for a planned day out. However, within minutes, all three will be fighting for their lives.
It starts with Jill’s car inexplicably losing power. Then, after carefully negotiating bringing the vehicle to a safe halt, the trio are tipped into the nearby lake by a rogue police car, seemingly suffering from the same electrical issues. As Jill and Noah swim to safety, they fear for Matilda’s fate, eventually relieved to see her already on the river bank being tended to by the local sheriff.
Walking back home to grandma’s, she informs them that phones aren’t working and stores are only taking cash. Exhausted by the day’s events, all of them decide to head to bed early, but sleep is seemingly impossible.
Jill doesn’t think much of it, until cycling to her early-morning shift. The streets are filled with people. Then, when she arrives at work, she encounters a familiar face in the form of her psychiatrist Murphy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). With reports of long-term coma patients waking up and everyone else unable to lose consciousness, it’s clear something is majorly amiss and the consequences could be deadly for everyone.
Jill is convinced though, that Matilda has definitely snoozed since her ordeal – perhaps she could be the key to helping solve this rapidly escalating crisis?
‘‘Within 48 hours there will be a loss of critical thinking. Ninety-six hours: hallucination, motor failure. After that, organs will fail, but then what? Days of paralysis until the heart shuts off.’’
A minor character lays out the scenario and ticking clock for us the morning after ‘‘the event’’. He then quickly updates that by hurriedly adding, ‘‘everything’s accelerated though. Symptoms appear two to three times quicker.’’
What that is really symptomatic of is Marc and Joe Raso and Gregory Poirier’s scatterbrained, scattershot scripting.
You can see what attracted Netflix to this story. It has the sci-fi-infused ‘‘intimate epic’’ feel of its smash hit Bird Box, but none of that film’s nuance, tension or thrills. Instead, we never get an adequate explanation of what actually caused the electrochemical and electrical ‘‘short circuit’’.
We simply find our familial trio facing a series of set pieces against various groups of ne’er-do-wells and have to endure plenty of exhortations for characters to ‘‘wake up’’ (my favourite was Barry Pepper’s preacher who believed this was all happening because ‘‘we need to be woke to see how the world really is’’.)
The side effects of sleep depravation, while sometimes effectively brought to life via an increasingly fuzzy frame and pointof-view shots, simply seem to allow the film-makers to justify the lessthan-smart decision-making that peppers the plot. Indeed, deep down
Awake has the feel of a zombie flick (Joe Raso’s previous credits include at least a couple of variations on a zombies-versus-cheer-leaders theme), except with afflicted who can still speak.
‘‘It’s gonna be total chaos,’’ our minor character friend also warns us early on. It’s sadly prescient.
As is at least part of, ‘‘maybe the only answer we’re going to get is that nobody is going to survive’’.
Ironically likely to be a cure for insomnia – I found myself drifting as the overwrought performances built towards a deathly dull denouement (although the overcaffeinated score is set to maximum irritation) – Awake is definitely not this year’s A Quiet Place or Bird Box, just a really massive disappointment.