The Horror of Not Sleeping (and Still Being Bored)
Insomnia can make you see strange things. Shadows move, time slows, your mind starts to unravel. Watching Awoken(2019) produces the same symptoms — except it’s not insomnia doing the damage, it’s the movie itself.
Directed by Daniel J. Phillips and co-written with Alan Grace, Awoken tries to be an atmospheric Australian horror about demons, science, and sleep deprivation. Instead, it’s a cinematic NyQuil — a film so committed to exploring sleeplessness that it ensures you never wake up again.
This is a story about a cursed sleep lab, a demonic possession, and a cast of medical students who couldn’t find a pulse even if they checked their own.
Plot: Wake Me Up Before You No-Go
Meet Karla (Sara West), a medical student with all the charisma of a stale energy drink. Her brother Blake (Benson Jack Anthony) suffers from a rare and conveniently cinematic condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia — a real disorder that’s terrifying in real life and dull as drywall here.
Blake can’t sleep, Karla can’t cope, and the movie can’t decide if it’s a medical thriller or a low-budget Exorcist remake.
Enter Dr. Robert (Erik Thomson), Karla’s instructor and part-time villain, who invites her to a secret underground sleep lab to “help” Blake. That’s right — a secret lab hidden under a medical campus. Because every reputable doctor keeps their illegal experiments next to the plumbing.
Joining them are Chris (who has sleep apnea), Angela (who has night terrors), Alice (who has “I read the cursed journal” syndrome), and Patrick — Karla’s ex-boyfriend and the designated pharmacist-slash-moral-support-slash-fodder-for-the-demon.
The team quickly discovers that the sleep lab is cursed, the insomnia isn’t natural, and the script is held together by jump scares and caffeine fumes.
The Demon in the Details
As Karla and her friends dig deeper, they find VHS tapes of her parents’ previous sleep experiment (because nothing says “scientific rigor” like demonic home videos). The tapes reveal her mother Sarah’s possession by a demon named Iddimu— a creature that feeds on insomnia.
Apparently, God invented sleep to keep Iddimu at bay. This is actually an intriguing theological idea — and the only interesting line in the entire film — but the script treats it like trivia, not the terrifying revelation it could’ve been.
Iddimu, by the way, is your classic lazy demon. He doesn’t have a distinct personality, catchphrase, or motive beyond “I hate REM cycles.” He’s like a cosmic Karen demanding to speak to your subconscious.
Soon, everyone starts hallucinating, dying, or delivering long, emotionless monologues about faith, science, and sleep deprivation. Angela sees things and kills herself. Alice reads the cursed journal and kills herself. Chris snores himself into the afterlife. You get the idea — it’s a horror film by way of a group project where everyone fails.
The Cast: A Sleep Study in Underacting
Sara West plays Karla with the detached expression of someone trying to remember if she left the oven on. Her emotional range goes from “mildly concerned” to “gently panicking.”
Erik Thomson, as Dr. Robert, has more backstory than the demon but delivers it with the energy of a man explaining his trauma to a vending machine. His “tragic past” — involving childhood abuse and a demon he thinks saved him — could have been genuinely disturbing if the film didn’t handle it like an awkward therapy session with bad lighting.
The rest of the cast exists mostly to die, which they do politely and without fuss. Even the demon looks bored halfway through.
Patrick, the ex-boyfriend, might as well have “Dead Meat” tattooed on his forehead. When Karla asks him to help her watch the haunted VHS tapes, he agrees immediately, because in horror movies no one has ever learned to just not press play.
The Horror: One Long Nap Interrupted by Screaming
If you stripped away the dialogue, Awoken could pass for a very expensive commercial for blackout curtains.
The lighting is perpetually dim, the walls leak with metaphorical dampness, and every scene feels like it’s taking place at 3:00 AM — which is fitting, because that’s when you’ll start checking the time.
The scares rely on the usual arsenal: flickering lights, demonic whispers, and faces popping up in dark corners like badly timed Zoom glitches.
What’s truly frightening, though, is how quiet it all feels. The movie is desperate to be atmospheric but ends up sounding like someone forgot to turn on the background music. Even the demon attacks are oddly well-behaved — more like a sleepwalking toddler than an agent of evil.
And for a film about insomnia, there’s a lot of whispering about dreams, sleep cycles, and brain chemistry. It’s like someone turned a neuroscience lecture into a séance.
The Logic: Somewhere Between “Science” and “Satan”
Let’s pause for a second to appreciate just how many questionable decisions fuel this movie:
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Secret underground lab: check.
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Unlicensed medical experiment: check.
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Exorcism performed by unqualified personnel: check.
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VHS tapes as plot devices in 2019: double check.
We’re supposed to believe that a modern hospital has a forgotten demon lab hidden underneath it, filled with candles and Catholic symbols. Apparently, no one ever checked the basement during fire inspections.
The pseudo-scientific jargon adds to the chaos. Characters throw around terms like “REM suppression” and “neurochemical imbalance” as if saying them out loud could summon funding. The result feels less like a horror movie and more like an anxiety dream about failing medical school.
The Theme: Sleep Is Holy, and So Is Exposition
The film occasionally gestures toward a deeper theme — that sleep is a divine gift, that science can’t replace faith, that maybe our obsession with controlling the human body invites evil. These ideas could make for a fascinating psychological horror.
Instead, Awoken delivers them through dialogue that sounds like rejected fortune-cookie wisdom. Lines like “God made sleep to protect us from darkness” are repeated with the solemnity of a biblical revelation and the impact of a PowerPoint slide.
By the time Karla realizes the demon wants to possess her brother, we’re too numb to care.
The Climax: Satanic Yoga and Unpaid Electric Bills
In the grand finale, Robert fully embraces his inner lunatic, trying to “summon” Iddimu while standing in a candlelit room that looks like the world’s least successful spa.
Karla, apparently now a part-time exorcist, chants vague prayers while Blake convulses on a gurney. The demon kills Robert — possibly out of pity — and finally flees after Karla gives a heartfelt speech about family or something.
The ending hints that Karla herself is now cursed, which might have been haunting if the audience wasn’t already possessed by the urge to leave.
The Production: Pretty Shadows, Empty Souls
To its credit, Awoken looks decent. The cinematography leans into cold blues and shadows, which might have been chilling if they weren’t paired with editing that cuts like a dull scalpel.
The sound design is full of low hums, whispers, and creaking metal — the auditory equivalent of someone trying to scare you with a broken air conditioner.
The score, meanwhile, seems to have been composed by someone pressing one ominous piano key every 40 seconds.
The Ending: Awake But Dead Inside
After 90 minutes of dimly lit nonsense, Karla survives, her brother is freed, and the demon retreats — for now. The movie closes with Karla lying awake, unable to sleep, which the filmmakers clearly intended as poetic but plays more like karmic punishment for dragging us through this yawn of a nightmare.
It’s a setup for a sequel that no one asked for, titled perhaps Awoken 2: Even More Awake.
Final Verdict: A Cure for Your Sleep Problems
There’s a saying that horror should keep you up at night. Awoken takes that literally — not because it’s scary, but because you’ll spend the runtime checking your watch and wondering when the movie will mercifully end.
It’s a film that confuses atmosphere with apathy, and tension with tedium. Every potentially interesting idea — insomnia, faith versus science, trauma — is drowned beneath layers of clichés and whispering demons.
Even the devil deserves a better script.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 haunted sleep studies.
Because in Awoken, no one can sleep, no one can act, and no one can explain why there’s a secret demon lab under a medical school — but hey, at least you’ll get a good nap afterward.
