before i wake
Cast : Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, Jacob Tremblay, Annabeth Gish
Rated: 5/10
You go in thinking this one would be quite a scream. It is a scream. Sadly, however, that doesn’t last too long with the director going into the hows and whys of a possessed child.
As all children-oriented horror films go, the child in here, too, is cherubic. He has soulful eyes, a winning smile and innocence that can take your heart. He is also well meaning and knows that when he sleeps, terrible things happen. So, he doesn’t he keeps awake, reading butterfly stories under blankets, gulps down black coffee and is scared to bits even if he catches a wink by mistake.
But for his foster parents a couple which has recently lost their only son to a drowning accident the child’s dreams are a way to reach their dead son. So the mother wants Cody to sleep but the father, after an encounter with his dead son, calls it abuse.
Around this and same such incidents, with a bogged down past of a dead mother from the oncology department, the story moves, slowly and steadily killing all the screams and the suddenness on which a horror film survives.
The thing that goes wrong is that there is too much familiarity with the event at hand, something that is a no-no for anything in this genre. Just about okay for a lean, listless day.