Before I Wake

There is some potential, but it’s squandered and never leaves the paper of the core premise. Unfortunately, at least for me, this film doesn’t do it. Flanagan misses the emotional target (with a big “help” from the actors), and horror-wise, he hits only every third shot or so. The main spook is a thoroughly laughable and unscary figure with a personal history that it’s revealed in an irritating manner, during a literal ending that’s preceded by a five-minute climax, which actually can’t be called such. After the excellent and disturbing Oculus, I didn’t expect Before I Wake to be a painfully sober and more or less safe fairy-tale with no signs of true horror and terror. It also managed to annoy me even before the story properly gets going. It really pisses me off when films about dreaming and sleep, like this one, for instance, cram completely unrelated dialogues about the topic. Here, the characters, while chatting “importantly” about dreams, for no reason whatsoever, say that they feel “awake”… because it makes the writers feel the film will be more gripping? Bollocks! It feels terribly forced and fake. It gives me the impression that the characters only repeat written phrases, causing me to distance myself. It’s impossible to either root or fear for them. Three stars, and it might be a bit too generous for this film. (12.04.2016)

The premise is perfectly fine and carries you through even the weaker scenes by at least giving you a chance to contemplate how horribly amoral you are that you would ideally use Cody's gift/curse to pump him full of double-feature Ruth Negga movies and some very indulgent porn before bed. Flanagan, at least unlike most of today's horror royalty, isn't afraid to flesh the central idea into various impressive details that, despite the flat, fizzled-out plot, manage to unnerve you (the materialization of a vanished foster mother through the imperfect lens of a child), but it's the classic horror ills he managed to avoid in Oculus that are the undoing of his film this time. In fact, the characters are an utter disaster in their lack of characterization, dullness, and inability to generate the slightest interest (we don't know what they do, what they're into, if there was no plot these would be the most boring people in the world). You empathy is supposed to be evoked by the universal tragedy of losing a child and their general upright character, which isn’t enough and is mostly boring. Oh, and the jump-scares. (04.08.2016)

The film seemed like it might actually work. I liked that it didn’t feature the standard jump scares. It definitely wouldn’t have been so bad if the filmmakers hadn't literally buried it underground. It seemed to me that the writer and director didn’t want to overexert themselves and when the actors saw them, they decided to take it easy, too. Everything was going so spectacularly badly that the special effects department decided they couldn't care less about the butterflies and the alien was scary enough. And if that wasn't bad enough, the ending was so terrible that I had to cool off for a while to be able to give it two stars. (19.11.2016)

If it weren't for the ending, I would be able and willing to rate the movie much higher, but the horror element has disappeared from it and the film "Evil Never Sleeps" becomes a nostalgic family spectacle. However, the film is incredibly well cast in terms of acting, in the sense that it is well performed. More or less a horror film that you want to see in cinemas, which eventually succeeded. (25.06.2016)