Awake

The feeling of being awake for twenty-four hours straight is a very specific kind of hell. Your eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper, your thoughts start to fray at the edges, and the world takes on a strange, shimmering unreality. Now, imagine that feeling never ends. Imagine the entire planet is stuck in that 3:00 AM delirium, with no "off" switch in sight. That’s the nightmare fuel fueling Awake, a 2021 Netflix original that arrived with a decent amount of hype and then vanished into the digital basement faster than you can say "REM cycle."

I watched this movie on a Tuesday night while wearing one mismatched sock because I was too lazy to find the other, and honestly, that low-energy vibe felt oddly appropriate for the experience. Awake is a "high-concept" thriller, the kind of movie the streaming era produces in assembly-line fashion: take a universal human need, take it away, and watch society crumble in ninety minutes.

The Pandemic Brain Fog

Released in June 2021, Awake hit screens at a very strange time. We were all crawling out of lockdowns, blinking at the sun, and feeling a collective exhaustion that no amount of coffee could fix. In that context, a movie about a global inability to sleep felt almost too on the nose. It captures that specific brand of "Contemporary Cinema" anxiety—the feeling that the world is broken in a way we can’t quite see or touch, and that the systems we rely on (electronics, infrastructure, our own biology) are far more fragile than we’d like to admit.

Gina Rodriguez plays Jill, a former soldier and recovering addict who’s just trying to keep her life from unravelling when a mysterious pulse knocks out all the power on Earth. But the dead cars and dark screens are the least of her problems. Suddenly, nobody can sleep. Well, nobody except her daughter, Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt). As the world descends into a hallucinatory frenzy of "sleep-deprived psychosis," Jill has to get Matilda to a secret military hub where Jennifer Jason Leigh is playing a scientist who looks like she’s seen the script and knows exactly how this is going to end.

A Script Written on an All-Nighter

The biggest hurdle for Awake isn't the premise—it’s the execution. There is a version of this story that is a terrifying, claustrophobic character study. Instead, we get a road-trip movie that feels like it’s checking off boxes. We have the "creepy cult" scene, the "military gone rogue" scene, and the "unexpected ally" scene (featuring Shamier Anderson, who does his best with a thin role).

The movie’s logic is as shaky as a toddler on a caffeine bender. For a film about people losing their minds, the pacing is weirdly stagnant. We see glimpses of the horror—naked people standing on lawns staring at the sun, a truly bizarre scene involving escaped lab chimps—but it never quite coalesces into a sustained sense of dread. Gina Rodriguez is a fantastic actress, and she brings a raw, gritting-her-teeth energy to Jill, but she’s constantly fighting against a screenplay that wants her to make the most baffling decisions possible.

The film falls into that trap of "Streaming Era" disposability. It looks polished, the acting is professional, and the concept is "sticky" enough for a thumbnail, but it lacks the soul of a movie that was made to last. It’s a "content" movie, designed to be consumed and then replaced by the next Friday release.

Why Did It Vanish?

It’s fascinating to look back at Awake as a piece of "forgotten" cinema from only a few years ago. In the old days, a movie with this cast and budget would have sat in theaters for a month, built some word-of-mouth, or bombed spectacularly. On Netflix, it was the Number One movie for a few days and then simply ceased to exist in the cultural conversation.

Part of that is due to the "Franchise Fatigue" of its peers. In a world of endless Marvel entries and legacy sequels, a mid-budget sci-fi original has to be exceptional to leave a mark. Awake is merely... fine. It’s a B-movie with an A-list coat of paint. There’s a fun bit of trivia involving the director, Mark Raso, and his brother Joseph Raso writing the script together; you can almost hear the "what-if" dinner table conversations that sparked the idea. But the translation from a cool idea to a coherent ninety-minute journey gets lost in the fog.

There are moments where the film touches on something profound—the way humans turn on each other when they’re vulnerable, or the desperate lengths a mother will go to for a child she’s already failed once. But every time it gets close to a real emotional core, it gets distracted by another chase scene or a heavy-handed metaphor about "resetting" humanity.

Ultimately, Awake is a curiosity for the sci-fi completist or the Gina Rodriguez fan. It captures a very specific 2021 mood of "everything is falling apart and I’m too tired to care," but it doesn't offer enough insight or thrills to justify its own existence beyond a rainy Tuesday afternoon. It’s the cinematic equivalent of that 3:00 AM thought that seems brilliant when you’re half-asleep but looks like gibberish when you write it down the next morning. It’s not a nightmare, but it’s definitely not a dream either.

If you’re looking for a thriller that actually explores the terror of the human mind unraveling, you might be better off just staying up too late reading Wikipedia articles about deep-sea creatures. You'll get the same sense of unease, and you won't have to worry about the internal logic of the military subplots. Still, for a movie about the end of the world, it’s remarkably easy to sleep through.