Awoken

8/28/2022

Awoken co-writer/director Daniel J. Phillips had a choice. He could have made a movie about demonic possession, or a film about insomnia. Now, stories about people who are possessed by demons are about as dime a dozen as those about people who can’t sleep; the question is, how many films are there that deal with fatal familial insomnia (FFI)? Phillips chose poorly, to say the least. FFI is very rare, but that’s no reason to treat it lightly (quite the opposite, I’d say). I’d never heard of it before; it took me watching Awoken to learn about it, which is good — on the other hand, I still had to do some research afterward, not to educate myself further on it, but to verify that it was indeed a real condition, unlike possession. So here’s another question: why put the two together? In