This movie does the viewer a great service by informing the viewer the type of movie experience it will take him on in the first 5 minutes; it’s going to be a generic, slow, painful journey of a movie. Hopefully you didn’t pay for it or seek it out as a brief and cheap thrill to your otherwise boring day because there are better way’s to spend your time. This film hits every generic cliché before the movie even begins to gain any kind of traction as a form of entertainment.
Awoken starts, as these movies often do, in the past. A cheap and predictable jump scare later, it cuts to a bored main character in class. I don’t know why the main characters in these movies seem to know in a class that is extremely relevant to the plot, but here we are, in an incredibly foreshadowing lecture that kind of spoils the movie. Not that you should stick around for the rest of it anyways. It is also here that you learn, through lazy exposition, that the main character is orphaned by some mysterious event that will constantly be alluded till its lazy reveal. And of course her obsession to cure her brother’s insomnia is the driving force to the plot of the movie.
A bit hole in this movie is that everything about this girls life is written to make the plot work. Were she not a sleep scientist, having her life directly effected by the villain of the movie, or even been a sleep major, this movie could never happen. Were she a poetry major, for example, her brother would never be put in the hands of the demon. She wouldn’t even know which demon to research as even this seems to be handed to her as a way to move the plot forward. I understand that there is no such thing as a sleep major and I am leaving a lot of details extremely vague, but I want to break down the movie to its basic elements to show how incredibly generic and forced this plot is.
This movie clearly didn’t have enough plot to the movie. It seems to lazily movie from one moment of gore to the next to achieve shock. You see someone hang themselves because reasons and then it quickly tries to move to the next scene. There clearly wasn’t enough plot in this movie because when you aren’t watching gore, you get to watch the main character work on a failed relationship that existed off screen. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, that is because it isn’t. There are so many failed attempts at creating character depth in this movie, but all the characters are forgettable. This is mostly because they try to create this depth through exposition dumps. The best part of the film is a weirdly placed Settlers of Catan reference, but that isn’t reason enough to watch this movie.
This movie is without any real substance. There are so many holes in this movie that it doesn’t make sense. The parts that do make sense are done lazily and are rather boring. If you are a horror movie buff, you can find this concept done better elsewhere. This movie is so incredibly predictable that it becomes a chore to watch. Don’t pay for this movie, we can’t keep supporting these generic cash grabs for the sake of a movie date. We need content, narrative, and depth and this movie offers none of that.