Metacritic reviews

If the end-of-the-world genre seems downright somnambulant lately, Awake is jolting proof a fiendishly clever twist can shake it from its doldrums.

Awake has just enough scares and strangeness, plus a sense of dread and paranoia, to make its horror creepy and enjoyable. It’s not a flawless thriller, but enough different elements click into place, like Rodriguez and Greenblatt’s performances.

There are a few tense moments, good performances and a fair variety of settings to make it feel like a complete journey. But by having some science-fiction cause for why nobody sleeps, it’s not about actual insomnia in any way that’s relatable to anyone.

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

Awake becomes the saga of a mom’s redemption. Rodriguez works hard to make this personal angle compelling, exhibiting mama-bear ferocity, but the film’s ultra-bleak premise doesn’t cooperate.

So for those asking the obvious: Yes, Awake should put you to sleep rather quickly.

Awake is not even smart enough to play a little dumb, and so even the silliest, most gratuitous parts involving very cranky humans turning into killing machines are anticlimatic and frankly boring. The apocalypse has rarely been this abysmal.

There is no getting around it: Mark Raso’s Awake is bad. But at least it’s so bad that it’s often ludicrously laughable: Netflix may well have a cult turkey on its hands.

It’s all torturously uninteresting, a plodding retread that never once explains or justifies why it made the leap from “what if?” to actual full-length movie.

It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than Awake.