Awake is centred around college security guard, Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez). She’s an ex-army operative and ex-drug addict with suspicious levels of clearance and connections. She’s smart and runs a side-hustle selling expired drugs from the college lab, but is also a caring single mother to boot. One day, while driving her thankless kids back from her icy scolding mother-in-law’s house, a strange phenomenon renders her car inoperable and sends them all careening into a river. It quickly transpires that not only has the event left almost all electrical machinery useless, but also humans can no longer fall asleep. As neither drugs nor exhaustion will help, it’s readily apparent that pretty soon, everyone will descend into madness, before succumbing to complete organ failure. It’s up to Jill to get her daughter, the only person who can still sleep, to her ex-boss’s secret army lab before everything falls apart.
It’s pretty plain to see the thought process that lies behind Awake. After the surprising success of 2018’s Bird Box, it’s understandable that Netflix would be looking to release a similar film, and in theory almost all the pieces are in place to replicate that sort of experience. A global catastrophe with a sci-fi quirk has been the leaping off point for countless horror properties over the years, and it’s clear the Raso brothers were aiming for that goal. But Awake fails to meet the standards of films like A Quiet Place, The Darkest Hour, Cell, or just about any half-decent Zombie movie from the last few decades.
It doesn’t help that the story is initially both confusing, and obtusely told, and by the end, it’s still barely clear how Jill’s strange past makes sense. There is a hinted connection between her and Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s Dr Mengele-like scientist, but it’s vague at best, and the pair of Annihilation alumni share only a couple of scenes. That said, Rodriguez does at least come across as believable as the ever-more exhausted and stressed mother, trying to care for, and protect her kids as best she can.
The rest of the cast try to do what they can with the material, they’ve little to work with. Among the better moments, there is Barry Pepper, doing a credible turn as a kindly pastor, and the ever reliable Frances Fisher scowling for all she’s worth as Jill’s long suffering mother-in-law. Others, such as Finn Jones and Gil Bellows are clearly just picking up a cheque, and barely seem interested.
The other main issue is that despite the vagueness of the character connections and backstories, the dialogue and exposition is laughably obvious. Especially when despite there being no phones, TV or other electronic communication, after a single sleepless night, everyone in the story already seems to have realised that sleep is now physically impossible. The film also jumps time randomly throughout, with a sudden announcement at one stage that several days have passed, but no clear change in the actors’ portrayal of their situation or growing madness.
Ultimately, this is a subpar wannabe Stephen King story, more likely to induce sleep than the insomnia it aspires to portray.
Available on Netflix now