Tremblay shines as dreamtime becomes scare time
|||BEFORE I WAKE
DIRECTOR: Mike Flanagan
CAST: Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, Annabeth Gish, Jacob Tremblay, Dash Mihok
CLASSIFICATION: 13 V
RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
Struggling to come to terms with the death of their child, a couple adopt a cute 8-year-old boy. Jessie (Bosworth) and Mark (Jane) immediately take to Cody (Tremblay) who is polite, a bit shy, but a charming little thing.
At first, they put his insomnia down to anxiety about his new circumstances, but soon realise the child is afraid to fall asleep because his dreams manifest in reality. And, that means his nightmares, too.
Tremblay – who gave an incredibly affecting performance in Room – is on point here, too. He creates an innocent child without a trace of smarm who elicits strong protective instincts in his adoptive parents.
While Mark immediately strikes up the stronger relationship with Cody, it is up to Jessie to figure out what happened in the child’s past, which is when things become interesting.
Before I Wake follows the same trajectory as Mama – at first the child’s problem is ascribed to a psychological fault, then things turn supernatural and downright creepy.
The difference is, Before I Wake’s denouement goes back to a real-life psychological explanation, where Mama just went full on ghostly emanations coming from out of this world, embracing its horror setting wholeheartedly.
This movie is about dealing with loss and acceptance of death from a little child’s perspective and the end explanation will interest parents greatly. But it also makes the whole movie fall apart because real-world dramatics of loss just don’t blend with the horror elements.
Heartfelt drama doesn’t sit well in the filmic beats of suspenseful horror and director Flanagan never settles on a tone. So there are tender moments – like Jessie confronting her feelings of loss about her own dead child – but then the violins go screeching away and scary things pop up from under the bed and out of the wallpaper.
As Jessie finds out more about Cody’s troubled past, Gish and Mihok pop up with what could have been interesting, eccentric characters, but they don’t get to flesh out their parts much.
Wildly uneven, Before I Wake has its moments, but it never quite gels into something coherent or greater than the sum of its disparate parts. While some individual scenes will stick in your memory – the arty concepts for some of the scarier parts are quite beautiful, as is the explanation for what Cody manifests – the film is more holey than righteous.
If you liked The Boy or Mama, you will like this.