Kritika Kapoor, TNN, Updated: Jun 11, 2021, 09.22 AM ISTCritic s Rating: 2.5/5
It s hard not to compare
Awake to post-apocalyptic sleeper hits like
A Quiet Place and Bird Box, especially when it seems to be copy-pasting their formula, inserting insomnia in place of horrific creatures. There is uncanny similarity in the films cinematography too i.e. the cold blues and dark greys. However, despite having the right blueprint, and an interesting, nightmarish premise going for it,
Awake is a bit of a snooze. For starters, it lacks the atmospheric eeriness of its recent dystopian contemporaries, and is only successful in delivering a few jump scares from time to time. Also, while the thought of what happens if you can t sleep for days is fascinating - whether or not you have gone down the Wiki-hole of Stanford and Russian sleep experiments - the horrors don t seem to translate on screen, and watching a bunch of people act like murderous, sleep-deprived lunatics gets tedious re
is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. This time, we’re up to talk about and explain the ending of the Netflix movie Awake.
Don’t you hate it when you just can’t fall asleep, for the life of you? Well, that’s basically the plot of
Mark Raso’s
Awake but magnified just a little bit. The film (reviewed here) begins with a catastrophic event that wipes out all electronics and renders all of humanity unable to sleep. Once disaster strikes, retired soldier Jill (
Awake Finds a Mother s Nightmare in Insomnia and Religious Extremism
What happens when an overtired population unable to sleep finds a little girl who can? Bad news for all involved.
Netflix
Awake is the latest word jumble premise-turned-feature film to follow in the high-concept footsteps of
Jill (
Ariana Greenblatt) and the expectedly moody teen Noah (
Lucius Hoyos) and it’s been a rough ride so far. Her mother-in-law (
Frances Fisher) has legal custody of the kids due to Jill’s recent excursion into drug addiction and incarceration, but Jill is trying her best to do better. An overhead event of some kind kills all of the world’s electronics, and that includes most cars leading to an accident sending Jill and her kids into a lake. They recover quickly enough, but they soon realize along with everyone else that the incident has also left them all unable to sleep. Frustration, exhaustion, and fear soon begin to eat away at people’s mental states, and it only gets