Premiering at the Glasgow Film Festival 2024, WOKEN is a sci-fi thriller that packs a punch disproportionate to its small scale and short length. Despite some unfortunately clumsy tropes deployed in the third act, WOKEN still has enough twists and turns and enough contemporary relevance to be a thriller worth checking out.
Anna (Erin Kellyman) wakes up heavily pregnant with no memory of who she is. She’s being nursed back to health by Helen (Maxine Peake) and James (Ivanno Jeremiah), a man who says he’s her husband, who tell her that she’s on an island. But something feels off. Anna doesn’t know these people; the doctor (Peter McDonald) who visits is strange, and the husband gradually becomes more and more coercive.
One day, a swan boat lands on the island. It’s one of the film’s stronger images, implying so much about the world beyond the island. The boat contains a couple seeking a “safe zone” seemingly infected with something changing their appearance. James immediately shoots them dead and burns their bodies, much to the distress of Anna. She realises she’s been lied to: that the island isn’t just a home but a refuge from a pandemic that has infected three-quarters of the planet.
Writer and director Alan Friel started working on this film before the COVID-19 pandemic and was sure nobody would want to see a pandemic film after experiencing it in real life. COVID-19 proves to be both a help and a hindrance to the film. Though it impacted production to the extent that Friel had to direct some scenes from the quarantine of his car, the film’s engagement with the audience’s real pandemic experience also gives it a bite and relevance where it could otherwise feel quite abstract.
“Writer and director Alan Friel started working on this film before the COVID-19 pandemic and was sure nobody would want to see a pandemic film after experiencing it in real life. COVID-19 proves to be both a help and a hindrance to the film.”
The filming location of County Clare, Ireland, helps to create the opening’s eerie tone. The rugged landscape around the Wild Atlantic Way looks as desolate and unforgiving as the surface of an alien planet. The howling wind across the shingle and the vast empty space of the fields along the coast contribute to the first act’s sense of unease as Anna questions her surroundings. Her situation feels as inescapable as the island she finds herself on.
WOKEN takes inspiration from films like 28 DAYS LATER in its depiction of pandemic and quarantine and GET OUT in its gradual unravelling of a web of coercion around the protagonist. Unfortunately, where those films play with genre tropes to ironic effect, WOKEN starts to lean more and more into tropes, becoming very formulaic in the third act. Suddenly, all the Chekov’s guns from the first act end up in people’s hands, Anna finds herself in numerous conveniently escapable situations, computer displays start auto-playing their most narratively important recordings, and Helen starts speaking in long threads of exposition. It’s an unfortunate deployment of worn-out tropes in a script that starts so well.
Despite this, there are some interesting and unpredictable twists and turns towards the end, including one moment that made the audience at the Glasgow Film Theatre gasp out loud. It all adds up to an entertaining (if uneven) pandemic film that generally works well.