Dead Awake (2016)

Having gone through various drug and related mental issues, Kate Bowman (Jocelin Donahue) seems to have come to grips with life again. Or rather, she would have, if not for the onset of a severe case of sleep paralysis. Kate experiences it every night, with the added bonus of hallucinations (or are they?) of a standard hag-style apparition crawling onto her chest to suffocate her. Which, one night, she indeed does, supposedly from an asthma attack; too bad she didn’t suffer from asthma. Her twin sister Beth (also Jocelin Donahue) feels there’s something wrong with what happened to Kate beyond the tragedy of an early death. For one, she had a dream of her sister being suffocated in her sleep at the exact moment when that actually happened.

Then, Beth and some of her sister’s friends begin to suffer from sleep paralysis with the exact same non-hallucinations, too, so it becomes rather difficult for anyone not to believe there’s something more supernatural going on than the (not terribly) scientific explanations Kate’s former physician, Dr. Sykes (Lori Petty) delivers. As a matter of fact, without anyone else knowing, Kate had been seeking help from disgraced sleep scientist Dr. Hassan Davies (Jesse Borrego). Davies is convinced that there’s a long-standing epidemic of people actually dying of sleep paralysis, and he’s also convinced that what they see in their hallucinations is a real entity trying to kill them. Beth and Kate’s boyfriend Evan (Jesse Bradford) – who will also suffer from his own bit of magic sleep paralysis soon – just might be better off following that angle, if they want to survive.

Dead Awake is a bit of a mixed bag: the script by Jeffrey Reddick (creator of the original concept and story of Final Destination, among other things) contains some wonderful ideas, and interesting characters but the pacing seems off, sequences of tension are followed by scenes that seem to have no actual reason to be in the movie at all, and the supernatural threat stays vague rather than ambiguous. Phillip Guzman’s direction certainly doesn’t help the viewer over the script bumps. While there’s certainly nothing terribly wrong with it, the scenes of horror are rather on the generic side, only quite late in the game really using concepts of dream and sleep in any interesting ways and even then not doing much that’s visually distinguished or moody. Visually, it’s a pretty bland film, dominated by shots and set-ups that certainly do their basic jobs in the plot well enough but only seldom create a world for the audience to believe in or do much for the creepiness factor.

There’s good stuff in here too: Jocelin Donahue is good as Beth and Kate) as I by now expect her to be. Dead Awake gives her a character arc from guilt to acceptance to anger (that’s sometimes the more productive sequence) to hag-butt kicking that feels perfectly appropriate and perfectly human, and is certainly one of the real successes of the film. I also liked quite a few of the small clever details: for example how exactly the belief in the supernatural threat is what kills its victims yet also – of course – the prerequisite to beat it; or how awkward and half-crazed Davies is as what could be the film’s Van Helsing figure without turning him into a joke. The finale is also rather effective when it brings an internal struggle to life.


So, while I don’t think Dead Awake is terribly successful as a whole, I did find enough of interest in it to make it worth watching. At the very least, it tries its damndest to do something interesting. And hey, that’s certainly more than I’d say about The Conjuring.