BEFORE I WAKE: An Emotional Disaster

Mike Flanagan has been the saving grace of horror movies recently. His breakthrough horror, Oculus, blended a huge needed emotional weight to a genre that was devoided of it. Flanagan showed horror fans that emotions can be scary and terrifying. Unfortunately, Flanagan’s latest effort shows he has become a parody of himself. Before I Wake forces the emotional heft onto its viewers, promptly forgetting to scare its viewers or give them any sense of a story.

Mark (Thomas Jane) and Jessie (Kate Bosworth) have recently lost their son. To help move on, they have decided to adopt Cody (Jacob Tremblay), an 8-year-old orphan. What they don’t know is that Cody’s dreams come to life. What starts with harmless dreams become terrifying nightmares of the Canker man.

Dream Logic

Before I Wake feels very much like a dream. Not the surreal deliciousness that is David Lynch‘s dreamlike movies but more of a disjointed and messy dream. The kind that only makes sense at the moment of the dream but doesn’t as soon as you try to explain it to someone. The film starts out promising, like any dream, before commencing to feel messy and illogical.

Random things happen that don’t make sense in the grand scheme of the film and there are plotting issues that plague the entire movie. Flanagan fails to make any climax before trying to piece the movie’s mystery together using the final minutes of the film explaining his entire concept.

The first half of the movie focuses on the characters’ story and personality. It’s surprisingly promising as we follow this couple who recently lose their child. However, as much as Flanagan tries to force the emotions onto its viewers, it still ends up feeling quite empty. The characters’ stories, while entertaining, never fully capture your attention.

In the beginning, the mother uses the orphan’s powers to relive happy moments with her deceased biological son. This moment seems to come out of nowhere and feels forced in just to showcase the child’s magical powers. The film never bothers to come back full circle, opting for a race to the finish line. With moments like these, the writing doesn’t feel genuine, and much of it is due to its terrible plotting and rushed character moments.

Emotional Mess

Mike Flanagan‘s signature motif is character driven horror with an emotional twist. This formula worked for Oculus and Hush, but here, it doesn’t work. The film is over-steeped in emotions, and it’s so much of a focus that the other aspects get buried. It’s so in your face that it’s impossible to feel any emotions genuinely, feeling so fake that it does get rather annoying.

The life of our main characters is surrounded by death and problems so much as it doesn’t feel real. Instead, it feels like you’re watching fake movie characters. What makes that much more frustrating is that Flanagan has shown us capable of delivering real emotions and real characters through his direction in Oculus and Hush.

The film quickly falls apart when the action starts. It rushes to explain why such action has happened so that the viewer can feel the appropriate emotion. However, by rushing the explanation, it gets over the top. All the emotion the director tries so hard to make us feel is juxtaposed with the rush to explain. In the end, Before I Wake gets too emotional and muddled that it seems like a parody of itself, belittling the thematic content that Flanagan covered so well elsewhere.

Love, Lost

Before I Wake doesn’t have much to say, unlike Flanagan‘s other movies. It examines the mother-son relationship but only scratches the surface. While Kate Bosworth‘s character is interesting as a grieving mother, her character doesn’t evolve beyond that.

Having the adopted child in the home is a plot device rather than a decision to better the main character. It doesn’t have anything to add that other movie haven’t said before. While I admire the ambition to explore this concept in a horror movie, it doesn’t work throughout the whole movie.

Beyond that, the thriller explores dreams and trauma in a very simplistic manner, with a lack of depth and an explanation only comes up during the resolution. We only understand the child’s backstory at the end and never is it explained why the child’s dream came to life. This is what the whole movie pretty much feels like: it scratches interesting surfaces but never bothers to open the box. Unlike Oculus, it blurs the lines between reality and dreams for the sake of trying to be smart instead of serving a purpose. The fantastical elements of the film feel out of place, and for such a fantastical film, it feels drawn out and empty.

Conclusion

Although it takes its time to set up interesting characters, Before I Wake doesn’t have the story nor the suspense to keep it engaging, making this Flanagan‘s first misfire. It increasingly starts to feel like a parody of itself rather than being the smart, emotional horror movie that it wants to be. It’s stuffed full of emotions to hide the fact that it lacks story and it’s painfully obvious. The movie falls apart fast during the third act where it rushes its resolution leaving a lot of plot holes unexplained.

However, I’m sure Mike Flanagan will rebound and start to produce his magic again soon. It would be a shame to see him spiral down as his previous works show so much potential. His grand concepts are key to most of his horror movies, but here, the intimidating concept got to Flanagan‘s head.

Is this the beginning of the end for Mike Flanagan? What did you think of Before I Wake?

Before I Wake is now available on Netflix.