Awake (2007)

At the start of Awake, we are informed that every year 700 people wake up during surgery. It’s called ‘anesthetic awareness’. As in, they are under full anesthesia, can’t talk, move or communicate in any way – but they can still hear and crucially, feel everything that is going on around them.  It’s frankly, a petrifying concept, but how do you build a good thriller around it?

Hayden Christensen plays Clay, a super rich young man living in his late father’s shadow. He lives with his slightly overbearing mother (Lina Olin) whom he adores. He has also recently gotten engaged to the beautiful Sam (Jessica Alba), whome he adores even more, but for various reasons he hasn’t told mum about it. Clay has a serious heart condition which means that every day he is waiting and hoping for that all important call informing him that a suitable donor heart is ready for transplant. When the time comes, Clay wants his good friend and doctor, Jack (Terrence Howard) to perform the surgery, even though mamma has her own cardio specialist on stand by.

Well, you can guess as much that Clay will be the one who gets to experience the horrors of anesthetic awareness at some stage in the film, but I think there is no way you can guess what happens after.  I didn’t, and I won’t tell you either. Suffice to say, a third into the film, after you have been puzzling over where it was all going for some time, there is a major twist. A twist so wicked (in all meanings of the word), that everything that comes after cannot possibly live up to it. But, Awake is still a hack of a thriller. I was completely engrossed by everything on screen, freaked out (in a good way) by the surgery scene and totally sidelined by the unexpected turn. Yes, everything after the twist is a bit silly and improbable, and in some other movie this would very much matter. Here, it really didn’t bother me.  

That’s all I’m going to say about Awake. The less you know, the better experience you’ll have watching it.