By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Turlough Convery, Benny O. Arthur and Alessia Yoko Fontana
Directed by Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell
Written by Alberto Marini
Blue Fox Entertainment
We’re all cogs in the attention economy these days, aren’t we? Either scrolling in an increasingly desperate search for dopamine-spritzed meaning or, conversely, undertaking increasingly bombastic antics to get someone to stop scrolling long enough for us to co-opt or commodify their attention.
The trouble with attention-seeking, however, is that it’s more like a dirty bomb than a smart weapon—and sometimes recognition from the wrong quarters can blow up in your face. This is the lesson a cadre of very on-line, militantly idealistic environmental activists learn the hardest of hard ways in the wild, gore-festooned and frequently quite inventive WAKE UP. The film sees a high-minded, Lorax-ian quest to go viral on behalf of the animals and the trees careen from digital into the “real” world—and it quickly devolves into a nightmare of survival.
Things begin innocently enough: Our idealists—portrayed with Gen Z panache by Benny O. Arthur, Alessia Yoko Fontana, Jacqueline Moré, Kyle Scudder and Thomas Gould—are winning hearts and likes with videos of righteous speeches delivered in animal masks and streamed from smartphones. Are they starry-eyed from their belief that a better world is possible or too much screen time? Probably a little of both. Regardless, they’ve got a taste of that attention currency, and they’re eager to scale up. A plan is hatched to hide out overnight in a home goods superstore and stream themselves vandalizing the ever-loving hell out of it. To bring attention—there’s that word again—to the fact that the store is using wood clearcut from the Amazon, sure, but also clearly for on-line clout.
The first part goes off without a hitch, and soon they’re locked in the store, shooting the place up with paintball guns and covering the sales-floor mockup bathrooms with animal innards—you know, good wholesome fun. All they need to do to make it into the activist influencer hall of fame is avoid a couple of hapless security guards for the night.
Alas, one of those guards (Turlough Convery, previously seen in SAINT MAUD and THE DAMNED) isn’t so hapless after all. In fact, he not only practices making primeval forest weaponry out of found objects in his spare time, but is also teetering on the knife’s edge (sorry) between unemployment and insanity. Not a great combo, tbh. And when the inevitable (and disastrous) encounter comes, as we all know it will, he is not sympathetic to overtures suggesting he place the activists’ cause ahead of his livelihood. Instead, he takes a swan dive into the aforementioned abyss of madness. Soon the store is awash not only in bargains, but also blood.
From here, the film operates on two levels. First, as a parable existing somewhere on a spectrum of tradition between DEATH WISH and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, in which high-minded, refined quasi-pacifists must get in touch with their primal, suppressed animal selves to kill, survive or both. Then, second, as a brutal, gleefully violent slasher. And although there are moments that feel perfunctory here and there on both counts, WAKE UP is a holistic success overall. It aptly interrogates and occasionally skewers (pun maybe intended) the current moment while delivering some very inventive kills and setpieces. Suffice it to say you will likely not think about glow-in-the-dark paint or assemble IKEA furniture without a chill going up your spine for quite some time after WAKE UP.
The film is also a solid addition to the growing canon of wild, smart genre films from the RKSS team—TURBO KID (2015), SUMMER OF 84 (2018), WE ARE ZOMBIES (2023)—which, despite exceedingly different plots and ultraviolent trimmings, bring a kinetic energy and sense of fun to these love letters to excess. It’ll definitely got your attention—insert knife and eye emojis, send tweet.
