To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, getting caught in one pandemic may be regarded as misfortune; getting caught in two looks like your agent may be keen on riding the post-Covid zeitgeist. After her turn as part of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s posse in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Erin Kellyman makes another plague outing in this good-looking but ineffective post-apocalyptic thriller (originally made in 2023).
A Familiar Premise
Kellyman’s bewildered survivor Anna, waking up in a shabby cottage on an isolated island, doesn’t even know she’s in the midst of a pandemic at first. Amnesiac and heavily pregnant, she has to trust grinning neighbour Helen (Maxine Peake) when she says Anna has had a bad fall and that James (Ivanno Jeremiah) – also prone to smiling a bit too much – is her husband. It’s only when a swan-shaped pedalo boat deposits a pair of crustacean-faced infected castaways, and her seemingly lovely friends shoot and burn them, that she begins to realise this is no island paradise.
Visuals and Performances
Framed by brooding shale cliffs and magnifying Anna’s fragility indoors, as she pores over dead tortoiseshell butterflies and repulsive lobster dinners, Alan Friel’s debut follows in the social-realist Brit sci-fi tradition of Never Let Me Go and Children of Men. It’s also well acted across the board, especially the wide-eyed, floundering Kellyman and the always authoritative Peake, who is charged with concealing the truth of Anna’s situation. It’s a bit of a mystery, then, why Woken never really gels.
Structural Issues
The first half covers up some tepid domestic parlour games by prettifying them with seagrass-fringed impressionism, while the second half shifts the needle towards more strident sci-fi, with clandestine labs, ligament-weaving surgery units and fascistic hazmat squads. But the conspiracy Anna uncovers and her gun-toting exit feel regurgitated, while the film’s overlapping ambience with Children of Men rapidly becomes a certifiable debt. Woken might believe it’s on an island apart, but sadly that’s not the case.
Woken is available on digital platforms from 25 May.
