As the only member of the Goggler team suffering from sleep problems recently, I feel like I’m eminently qualified to review Netflix’s latest movie Awake, where some unknown phenomenon prevents the entire world from falling asleep at all. (This is not a bit. I’ve not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in 2 weeks… and I don’t even have kids!)
Not having to sleep might sound like it would lead to a helpful boost in productivity and a surplus of free time but whatever happened in Awake doesn’t remove the body’s need for sleep. It just prevents everyone from falling asleep.
Jill (Gina Rodriguez), a college campus security guard with a past just as mysterious as the event that’s preventing sleep, seems strangely knowledgeable of what those side effects will be. With all electrical devices also rendered inert (cars, phones, planes, EVERTHING), and the world starting to crumble around her, Jill strives to protect her two kids (Ariana Greenblatt and Lucius Hoyos) and find out if there even is a way to restore sleep.
What can one mother do against the body’s own unstoppable ticking clock? As Brian (Iron Fist’s Finn Jones) bleakly points out:
After 48 hours of no sleep there’s a loss of critical thinking. 96 hours, hallucinations, motor failure, but what about after that? Organs will fail, but then what? Days of lying in paralysis until the heart shuts off?
It’s an absolutely horrifying prospect but one that Awake seems unsure how to follow up on.
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
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At first, the film feels like it’s going to be a “scientists race against time” movie, as Jill is invited to a military outpost called The Hub, by Dr. Murphy (a barely used Jennifer Jason Leigh) from her college. Jill refuses. A decision she doubles down on once she realizes that one of her own family is still able to sleep. Rather than subject her family to experimentation, Awake seems to be moving into very grim territory as Jill begins to prepare her family for a world after she’s gone. Which would have been an interesting direction had they not unsatisfyingly ended up at the hub anyway.
Awake has a couple of great ideas but a lack of focus means it never really follows through with any of them. A church pastor standing against his congregation as they prepare for a ritual sacrifice to try and restore sleep. Encountering a prison break as you flee the apocalypse. Not trusting the only scientists working on a solution with a family member because you know exactly how zealous they can be in pursuit of their goals. All of these would be great ideas to base a film around, but cramming all three (and more!) into Awake results in the film feeling directionless.
A film about not being able to sleep would seem to lend it self to Lynchian or Cronenbergian flourishes, to slowly devolving into a dreamlike state as the protagonists lose their ability to focus, and for a time, Awake feels like it might wander into such territory. Alas, it does not.
I Can’t Get No Sleep
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At one point in the movie, Jill points out that, “If we don’t sleep … your mind will bend and bend until it breaks.“ And the movie does try to deliver on that promise by providing some eerie imagery like a crowd of naked people placidly facing the sunset. But after flirting with a few blurry shots and hallucinations, Awake decides to abandon this entirely. Instead, the climax is built around demented military personnel shooting at each other with suspicious focus.
The cast is all fine, although you can’t quite escape the feeling that you’re at a party where the hosts get progressively more drunk and messy while you remain stone cold sober. Rodriguez veers from super capable super soldier, practicing routines to test her mental sharpness, to making dumb decisions not even related to her lack of sleep. The bigger question is why Barry Pepper, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Frances Fisher, Gil Bellows, and Finn Jones all turned up for such minuscule roles?
In the end, a solution is found, but it feels like one that might have been discovered a little earlier. This results in an end scene that aims for emotional suspense but misses the mark completely. All of this has the film feeling slightly ludicrous.
Still, I learned a lot about sleep. Thanks to Finn Jones again, it’s good to understand where that cramped feeling in my head for the past week has come from.
Right now your brains are slowly swelling. Our cranial walls are impressing on the brain and it’s affecting our critical thinking. It’s what happens when we don’t sleep. Now the more excited we get, the more blood flows to the brain, the worse we are. So the best thing we can do right now is take a deep breath and calm down.
Awake has a nightmarish premise that it fails to deliver upon, but despite my own lack of a good night’s sleep, I can say that at least it didn’t put me to sleep.
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