WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Awake, now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix's Awake tells the story of a world where people can no longer fall asleep, descending into madness and bringing about the downfall of society. Due to a solar flare, the electromagnetic circuits, not just in cars, but in humans have been fried. The glymphatic systems in the CNS can't clear the cranial waste fluid anymore, so sleep has become impossible. However, in the final act, as Jill (Gina Rodriguez) takes her daughter, Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt), to a military facility to be studied, they get a surprise cure in the midst of a bloody war.
Matilda is studied by Jill's former boss in the army, Murphy, and other scientists such as Katz. However, Katz kills Murphy via a lethal injection after the serum they cooked up to help them survive after six days of no sleep has plunged the base into chaos, with people hallucinating and killing each other. Matilda's petrified, seeing monkeys being experimented on to no avail and an older woman, who could sleep, dying.
Luckily, Jill escapes captivity amidst the melee but when she tries to flee with Matilda, her son, Noah, also hallucinates and ends up getting electrocuted by prodding a wire. He dies, but Matilda grabs a defibrillator and they try to shock Noah back to life. Sadly, they end up getting shocked as well, leaving them all unconscious as the chaos goes into the morning.
Matilda wakes up the next day and while she and Jill initially think Noah's dead, along with everyone else, Noah comes to. It turns out he was asleep after being so tired from going a week without sleep. Matilda deduces this by reconciling her experience early on in the film. When the flare hit, she was drowning and although a cop revived her via CPR, saying she went out for a minute, the girl realizes she actually died.
He brought her back without knowing and so, reset her in this horrific new world order. Thus, she tells Noah they need to save their dying mom by killing and resuscitating her. They take her to a lake nearby and akin to a baptism, they drown Jill, who has no choice as she's on her last breath. They then perform CPR on the shore and as the film cuts to black, Jill gasps. She comes back to life, and with her military resources and contacts, she can get word out to the masses.
For Jill, this experience is connects to her lost faith. In the army, she tortured people for Murphy and when the boss got her a job at a university working security years later, Jill dealt with her PTSD by taking and selling drugs. She was also struggling with the loss of her husband during the war, which all led to her mother-in-law, Doris, taking the kids. Doris was trying hard to get Jill to come back to the church, but Jill turned away from religion. In the end, this restores her belief.
As for Matilda, she was told by the pastor in the church when she sought haven in the first act that he overdosed, died and was brought back to life. It was his new beginning, ergo why he began spreading the word of God. Coupling this with seeing people in the church trying to sacrifice her, as well as each other, for a cure to sleep, Matilda was questioning mankind's purpose. Now, she understands people have a chance to purge themselves through this factory reset, so to speak, and she's the Chosen One meant to spread this word.
Directed by Mark Raso, Awake stars Gina Rodriguez, Shamier Anderson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Awake is now streaming on Netflix.
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