Before I Wake follows Jessie and Mark (Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane), a married couple that lost a child in an accident. They’re still having trouble dealing with the loss when they decide that they want to become foster parents. They take in seven-year-old Cody (Jacob Tremblay), who turns out to have an amazing power. When he sleeps, his dreams manifest in reality. At first, Jessie sees this ability as a blessing and attempts to use it so that she can see her dead son again. But Cody’s nightmares become real, too, and a dangerous figure in his subconscious is soon causing havoc for the family.
The most interesting thing about this film is Jessie’s willingness to take advantage of this young boy for the sake of getting to see her son again. There is still something really broken about her, and it affects her treatment of this young boy that she’s supposed to be taking care of. At some point, he becomes something less than human to her. He merely becomes the conduit through which she gets to re-experience moments with a real son that she misses dearly. Mark later opines that this feels like abuse, and he’s not wrong.
This might be what the true horror of the movie is. Jacob may be the source of the monster that provides the physical danger of the movie, but it is Jessie’s inability to move on from the death of her son that is most horrifying. That’s kind of clever, but the film ultimately gives more focus to the standard horror elements. In its back half, the movie shifts the focus from Jessie’s awful behavior to her trying to find a way to deal with this monster that’s killing people. The film wades through a pretty boring investigation, sending Jessie to one drab location after another, gathering pieces of a puzzle that don't really need to be solved.
And the film’s standard horror elements aren’t really all that scary. Part of the problem is the heavy use of visual effects to depict the weird stuff that happens. The monster of the film isn’t really all that terrifying. Though it does cause a few deaths, it seems weirdly benign. It routinely lets people live for the benefit of plot convenience. It shows up in the background of scenes and does nothing remotely threatening.
The movie could have at least really gone crazy with it. This is the realm of dreams, after all, and a child of Cody’s age could be having wildly varied visions of strange and terrifying things. But it turns out that his dreams are full of recurring motifs. And then he always seems to dream about the last thing he was told about, except in the climax, where things that he has no knowledge of suddenly manifest. Jacob Tremblay, last seen in Room, is pretty good in this role as well, the young actor easily conveying the inherent strangeness of this young boy. But Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane don’t quite hold up their end of the bargain.
Before I Wake touches on some interesting territory, but it ultimately doesn’t have enough courage to really follow through. It trades in its most interesting elements for stuff that you can see in any other horror movie. The film just makes a villain out of a phantasm and throws some psychological mumbo jumbo around in an attempt to tie all things up neatly. But there is a more interesting horror story in here, about a mother so consumed by her own grief that she ends up doing horrifying things. The film tries to make a hero out of her when all is said and done, and that feels like a really boring choice.
My Rating:
