Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'The Awakening' (2011)

Yeah, this movie was pretty good. Oddly sexual for a movie about a paranormal investigator at a boys academy. I can compare the atmosphere and stylization to The Others, without the lame twist ending.

This movie is about a woman who goes around debunking the paranormal, so you can pretty much guess this is going to be her first encounter with the real deal. And thank fucking god The Scooby-Doo Effect never reared its ugly head. Yeah, I know that's kind of a spoiler but... if you couldn't guess that much from the movie description, I'm not sure if I care that I spoiled it.... because you're an idiot.

Yes, the atmosphere was fantastic, the acting superb, the story well thought out. You could tell the writers went out of their way to avoid corners and dead ends. I'm sure you could still find them if you went looking, but the point is they don't stick out like a compound fracture. I can think of one thing that made me do a little head tilty, but I do have reasonable theories as to why it happened other than "the director needed it to."

Unfortunately, this was attached to a scene this movie just absolutely did not fucking need, so even still it's hard to justify. I'll get to it later in the spoilers.

I absolutely loved how multi-dimensional all the characters were. There were so many layers, there wasn't time in the plot to peel them all back. It left you wondering in a good way. It creates depth and the best part is, it doesn't need to be justified, it just seems to make sense. A war hero, now a school master with a stutter he tries desperately to cover. There's this war dodger (which at that day and age was tantamount to treason), who is so much more than just a coward. He's downright spiteful and jealous of the bravery of those who went to war. The head matron who looks at the female lead with the eyes of a loving mother, more than just a little obsessed with the main character. A professor who is vicious and cruel to the children but honestly does so out of love (which makes it really fucking scary). This is just the supporting cast mind you. The whole movie is about peeling away the layers of the main character.

SPOILERS!!!

Okay, so the head matron is actually a mother figure to the main character. This whole movie is essentially about uncovering what happened to the female lead's childhood. You know from the very beginning that she's obsessed with debunking the paranormal because her real parents were murdered and she desperately wants to believe in the paranormal. But there's this black spot in her memory about what happened to her parents, and while you know throughout the movie that she's going to encounter a real fucking ghost, you're kinda left to wonder what it has to do with her dead parents. This is kinda why this movie is so brilliant. No twist ending, just slowly putting the pieces together like any good mystery movie. The reason the matron looks at the female lead all doe eyed like she's her lost daughter is because, for a time, she raised her like a daughter. The matron was her wet nurse as a child and the headmistress of her father's house growing up.

So, what the fuck does this have to do with the female lead's parents? So, the boys school is actually the female lead's old house, sold off to the state after he father went on a murderous rampage that only she survived. Among the victims was the female lead's best friend and bastard child of her father and the matron. The child now haunts the estate which is now a boys school, and the head matron uses a tragedy there to lure the female lead back. Apparently, the matron wants her family back and has this idea that if she can get the female lead to remember her past, she might stay with them. I'm not going to ruin the rest because that rabbit hole just gets deeper.

There was one problem I mentioned before. There's this scene when the ghost boy clearly locks the male lead in his bedroom. This doesn't make much sense because he does it at a time when he knows the female lead is in danger. This leads to a whole "almost rape scene" which was com-fucking-pletely un-fucking-necessary. But then the ghost boy saves her. Why would the ghost boy go through all that trouble to almost get her killed, then save her life? I have two theories, but they both come down to the fact that the whole "almost rape scene" was just flat out senseless.

Theory one is that the ghost boy was trying to get her killed because he wanted her to stay forever, then effectively had second thoughts. He is just a kid after all. The other is that he was still trying his damnedest to scare the ever-living bejesus out of her so she'd come around and it just went farther than he intended. It just left me wondering and even worse it's attached to a scene that was just absolute garbage.

Still, this didn't kill the whole movie and never amounted to more than just a roll of the eyes. I still highly recommend this one.