Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Awake’ on Netflix, an Apocalyptic Thriller in Which Everyone Goes Nuts Due to Sleep Deprivation

Netflix movie Awake enters the high-concept sci-fi sweepstakes with a premise in which everyone on the planet loses the ability to sleep. Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) gets top billing, under the direction of Mark Raso, helming his second film for Netflix after 2017’s Kodachrome. So on paper, the film has a fair amount going for it, but will it be an all-night rager or just a dullsville yawner?

AWAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jill (Rodriguez) seems miserable. She works the night shift as a security guard, and supplements her surely paltry income by burgling expired prescription drugs and selling them to a scummy dealer. She has two kids, teenager Noah (Lucius Hoyos) and 10-year-old Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt), who are under the legal guardianship of their paternal grandmother (Frances Fisher). Jill is a recovering addict and former soldier who used to work under military psychologist Dr. Murphy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and OH SHIT the car just died and all the other cars on the road died too and the brakes don’t work and they just got broadsided and they tumbled off a bridge into the river and they barely escape and Noah and Jill get to the shore just in time to see police officers doing CPR on Matilda who coughs and sputters awake WHEW.

Something happened, who knows what. Electricity and all things electronic are dead. Jill walks the kids to the hospital, which is overrun with emergencies, and they quickly learn their cuts and bruises and near-death experiences are not a priority. Jill randomly wanders into the coma ward because the plot needs her to, so we can see that all the patients are awake. Strange, I say, strange. They go back to Grandma’s house and when night comes, nobody sleeps, and Noah looks up at the stars and watches all the satellites shooting through the sky out of control. Actually, Matilda catches some Zs, which makes her an anomaly in this crazy apocalyptic new world where it’s surely maddening, being inflicted with permanent insomnia, which will soon render all the world’s denizens insane and thereafter dead, made all the worse since no one is able to binge-watch The Office or Twin Peaks: The Return.

And so Matilda is an object of crazed interest. The highly unconvincingly written religious folk at Grandma’s church want to pray with her or maybe sacrifice her, and the scientists, specifically and conveniently led by Dr. Murphy, want to experiment on her in order to find a cure. Religion and science, forever the Hatfields and McCoys, ain’t they? Jill’s protective mommy instincts kick in, and she puts the kids in an old car without a computer in it and hits the road. She knows what Dr. Murphy did to people back when, and it was horrible, so she’s torn. Should they risk taking her to the military stronghold? It’s only a matter of a few days before sleep deprivation will result in her and Noah’s drawn-out and heinous death, so she better make up her mind soon.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: As in Blindness, set in a world where everyone suddenly goes blind, and as in Children of Men, set in a world where everyone is sterile, Awake, set in a world where everyone is an insomniac, there is always one person, or a select few, immune to the affliction. Always. It’s a Hollywood law and it shan’t be defied.

Performance Worth Watching: Rodriguez is good in Annihilation and even better in Kajillionaire, but those of us yearning to see her in a headlining role will be disappointed that Awake doesn’t give her much of a character to work with.

Memorable Dialogue: “Oh f—!” exclaims Little Matilda at a key point in the movie, and context is everything, but also a spoiler.

Sex and Skin: A weird scene in which a small cult of sleep-deprived naked people wanders into the road is not particularly sexy.

Our Take: Why didn’t they try unplugging society, waiting a minute, then plugging it back in? Stupid movie characters. Always with the running around hysterically and hurting each other, never trying the simple solution.

Awake is a second-rate ground-level medium-low-budget apocalyptic thriller with a few nicely staged action sequences hampered by a shoddy screenplay. Visually, Raso culls some moves from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men playbook, employing a few long takes during elaborately staged set pieces. But as a writer — Raso co-scripts with Joseph Raso from a story by Gregory Poirier — he struggles to render the plot coherent, and populates it with boilerplate characters working their way through half-assed emotional arcs and reciting dialogue laden with exposition. When a character is forced to say “We haven’t slept in four days” in order to make the audience aware of what’s going on, it’s a sure sign the script is in dire need of another pass or two through the writer’s room.

The idea that the whole of the populace — excluding Matilda, another plot-device human and probably a few others out there somewhere — is slowly descending into a state of delirium? Nifty premise, and it could’ve been honed into something funnier, scarier and richer in subtextual metaphor by a filmmaker who was less content to ape the work of more inspired storytellers. The crazy scene in church is a real eyeroller; inevitably, Jill and the kids face danger here and there, because malevolent shitbirds always emerge in these types of movies, and kind souls are scarce; a scene in which they come across a cadre of escaped convicts in their prison jumpsuits is a perfunctory cliche; when bullets are fired, as they inevitably must be during societal collapse, they always miss Jill, by inches even.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Raso’s camera gets more woozy and jittery as the characters go deeper into the hoary grottos of sleep-dep, which feels like an excuse to cover up the increasingly sloppy plot. And the ending? Anticlimactic, vaguely dissatisfying, a borderline-howler. The story’s numerous lapses in logic could be explained away by the characters’ lack of shuteye, but I’m not feeling generous: I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers wrote this screenplay in their sleep.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A few groovy action sequences don’t distract from the fact that Awake comes off as a fuzzy carbon-copy of other, better movies.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Awake on Netflix