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To paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, a single plague can be considered a disaster; double-caught it looks like your agent may be eager to ride the post-Covid zeitgeist. After his time as part of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s estate 28 Years Later: The Bone TempleErin Kellyman is making another splash in this beautiful but dysfunctional post-apocalyptic game (originally set in 2023).
Kellyman’s mysterious survivor, Anna, wakes up in a small cabin on a remote island, unaware that she is in the midst of an epidemic at first. Amnesiac and heavily pregnant, she has to trust her neighbor Helen (Maxine Peake) when she says that Anna has fallen badly and that James (Ivanno Jeremiah) – who also loves to smile – is her husband. It is only when a canvas-shaped boat puts two captives in the face of a crab, and his good-looking friends shoot and burn them, that he begins to realize that this is not an island paradise.
Made of shale rocks and amplifying Anna’s vulnerability in the house, as she watches dead tortoiseshell butterflies and lobster dinners, Alan Friel’s debut follows the Brit sci-fi tradition of Never Let Me Go and Children of Men. It also works for the rest of the cast, especially the wide-eyed, unflappable Kellyman and the ever-acceptable Peake, who is charged with hiding the truth about Anna’s past. It’s a bit of a mystery, then, why Woken didn’t really gel.
The first half takes on a quiet domestic game by sprucing it up with a sea-weed visual, while the second half shifts the needle to hard-hitting sci-fi, with underground labs, ligament surgery units and hazmat squads. But the plot that Anna uncovers and her exit from the gun feels disappointing, while the film’s connection to Sons of Men becomes a definite credit. Woken may believe it is on a different island, but sadly it is not.
