Review: In Mark Raso’s Awake, the Insomnia Apocalypse Suggests a Confusing Dream

It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than Awake.

Awake
Photo: Netflix

It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than director Mark Raso’s Awake. Clearly following the recently trodden path of John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place and Susanne Bier’s Bird Box, the film spins some highly dubious conjecture about all electronics being wiped out, rendering humanity unable to sleep. But it’s less the unlikelihood of its speculations and more its moment-to-moment incoherence that distinguishes Awake as the most bewilderingly slapdash rendition of such familiar parables about the nuclear family confronting the end of the world.

Jill (Gina Rodriguez) is a recovering drug addict who steals prescription opiates from the psychiatric facility where she works as a security guard in order to supplement her income. In what has become an oddly typical trope of domestic life upended by social chaos, the apocalypse begins while Jill is driving with her children, Noah (Luclus Hoyos) and Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt). Something like an electro-magnetic pulse shorts out their car and those around them, causing them to coast into each other. This leads to one of the film’s two in-car “oners,” an extended, claustrophobic shot from inside the family’s vehicle as it’s struck hard enough to send it rolling into a lake. Jill, Matilda, and Noah, improbably, are all conscious and relatively unscathed as they’re thrown around the car, which then begins to fill with water.

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The outbreak of the crisis is also, both ironically and fittingly, the moment that the film itself seems to stall out. Whatever suspense the family’s car accident generates is undercut by a befuddling—but, as it will turn out, highly plot-relevant—moment that asks viewers to forget that we’ve been following the crash in real time alongside the family. One problem that Awake has is this disconnect between style and script, as Raso, in moments like his two claustrophobic takes from within a car, shows that he’s more eager to imitate the flashier aspects of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men than to establish a believable, detailed world.

The haphazard handling of space and time doesn’t bode well for a film that sees Jill and her family racing against a deadline. By the day after the crash, everybody seems to have pieced together that whatever wiped out all consumer electronics also eliminated people’s ability to sleep, and the insomnia apocalypse is upon them. Except that Matilda turns out to be one of the few people in the world still capable of catching winks, which turns her into a person of interest among the shadowy government types led, coincidentally, by Dr. Murphy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the leader of the psych lab where Jill had been working. As Brian (Finn Jones), Murphy’s assistant, helpfully summarizes, a lack of sleep leads eventually to psychosis and death, so humanity only has so much time to find a cure—which Murphy hopes to discover by running terribly unspecific tests on Matilda and the only other known unaffected individual.

While any writer knows all-nighters can impair one’s cognitive facilities to some degree, Awake has Christians reverting to blood sacrifices on day one and cannibals roaming rural highways sometime around day four—not that there’s a particularly strong sense of pacing in the not-quite-picaresque series of contrived episodes that mark Jill and her family’s journey to safety. The film is in such a rush to get to the kinds of scenarios produced when zombies, aliens, and malevolent spirits cause the apocalypse that it has Brian explain at one point that “for some reason” the symptoms of sleep deprivation have been accelerated.

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Accelerated, that is, for most everyone but Jill and her family, who begin getting a little loopy but never join the ranks of the crazed and murderous. It can be difficult to tell whether they’re behaving strangely because of sleep deprivation or because of a script without consistent dynamics of character and plot—like when Noah threatens to burn the paper containing the location of the government lab in order to convince his mother to…go to the government lab.

Regardless, the characters’ insomnia can’t explain away the film’s inability to thread together its ideas with a sense of salience and consistency. Every car seems to be malfunctioning until the moment the narrative needs the rule to be that “not all of them” were affected by the event, and Jill forcing tiny Matilda to hold guns and siphon gasoline seems like an almost darkly-comic instance of child abuse rather than survivalist bonding. As for the film’s climax, it involves a defibrillator and some magical thinking whose arbitrariness the script doesn’t even try to mask behind the hyper-vague science-y talk it had deployed up to that point. Watching Awake is less like experiencing the delirium and stress of a sleepless week and more like being stuck in a confusing but not particularly interesting dream.

Score: 
 Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Ariana Greenblatt, Lucius Hoyos, Shamier Anderson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Finn Jones, Frances Fisher  Director: Mark Raso  Screenwriter: Mark Raso, Joseph Raso  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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