970x125
A lot of movies open with somebody killing themselves. Not many open with a pregnant woman jumping off a cliff.
That is Woken saying hello. Director Alan Friel is not warming you up. There is no establishing shot of the island, no slow pan across cold water, nothing doing the emotional homework before you have agreed to sit with it. He drops you into the aftermath of something that already went wrong before the film started and keeps you there. Erin Kellyman stars as Anna, a pregnant woman who wakes up with no memory in a stranger’s house on a remote island while the mainland collapses under a viral pandemic. Maxine Peake plays the woman who saves her and plays as mother. Ivanno Jeremiah does a fantastic job as our mysterious husband. Woken releases digitally on May 25 via 101 Films.
It is being billed as a sci-fi horror thriller. That’s true. But it is also a film that refuses to stay in any one of those categories for longer than it has to.
The Kind of House That Has Already Made Up Its Mind About You
Imagine waking up after trying to drown yourself. Pregnant. No memory of your name, your life, or how you ended up on this island. The woman explaining that she saved you is warm and calm and reasonable, and everything about her activates some deep animal alarm system you cannot pin down. Her husband seems kind. The house has been rotting from the inside for what looks like twenty years, not dramatically crumbling, just quietly surrendering in the walls and the baseboards and everywhere your eyes land. Nobody mentions it. You are a guest here. Nothing about the place agrees.
The Get Out comparison surfaced for me almost immediately. Not because the plots share anything obvious but because Friel builds the same sustained low-frequency dread through social pleasantries and small inexplicable wrongness. Except here you are on a remote island instead of a suburb, and the folk horror loneliness of the geography thickens the dread considerably.
There is a delightful flavor of domestic horror where the threat never quite crystallizes, but the discomfort accumulates in your body until you feel physically wrong about the room you are sitting in. The production design earns every credit. The buildings do not look stylishly dilapidated. They look sick in a quiet, unremarkable way that keeps bothering you, and the contrast with the cold sweeping island landscape outside keeps establishing the distance between where Maya is and anywhere that might actually help her.
Kellyman Is Carrying This Film
Erin Kellyman is very good here. She is tracking the emotional logic of a woman who has to locate herself and assess her situation simultaneously, with no memory to orient either task, while visibly pregnant and increasingly certain she is a prisoner rather than a patient. All of that recalibration happens in her face. The film trusts her to carry it without spelling it out.
Ivanno Jeremiah’s husband performance is the kind of work that gets overlooked precisely because it is so grounded. He doesn’t telegraph threat or do obvious genre function. He plays a real person inside a surreal circumstance and keeps the whole thing believable, which is harder than the showier roles and matters more to the film’s stability. Maxine Peake, meanwhile, gives you every reason to feel threatened while also giving you every reason to want to trust her, because she is Maxine Peake and this is exactly the thing she is extraordinarily good at. The tension between her warmth and the alarm she produces is the engine the entire first act runs on.
What the Island Is Actually Doing to Her
The cloning reveal is where Woken stops being one kind of horror and becomes something more complicated and more disturbing.
Without walking you through the specifics, the island is not a refuge. It is a project. Anna is not a guest and not a prisoner in any conventional sense. She is something the residents have been working toward, without her consent, without her memory, and the film spends its second half slowly pulling apart what that means and why anyone would sanction it. The ethical framework that emerges reminded me of V for Vendetta, not because the films share a genre but because both are interested in the utilitarian logic of sacrificing one to save many, and both are honest about how cleanly that logic can dress up something horrifying in the language of necessity. Woken keeps asking whether humanity deserves saving if saving it requires this, repeated, indefinitely. It keeps refusing to answer.
The medical examination table sequence is nightmare fuel. I will not elaborate. You will understand when you get there.
Post-Apocalyptic Swan Boats and Everything After
Outside the island, the disease does something that distinguishes Woken from most of the pandemic horror clogging the genre since 2020. It destroys the body while leaving the mind intact. People decay in real time, fully present for every stage of it. The collapse happening beyond the island’s borders is not spectacle in this film. It is the justification the residents use for everything they are doing inside it, and Friel is smart enough to keep making you feel both the scale of the tragedy and the horror of the response at the same time.
Then the film shifts into post-apocalyptic survival horror and I promise you I did not see it coming.
Woken keeps pivoting in ways that work. The isolation thriller becomes a prisoner story. The prisoner story sharpens into something involving ethics and bodily autonomy and repeated harm framed as necessity. That escalates toward something adjacent to action before the film pulls back down into something heavier. It should feel like a production that changed its mind three times. It doesn’t, and that is genuinely surprising. The emotional logic holds throughout because Kellyman holds it, and because Friel keeps tethering every genre shift to the same central question.
The scenic shots throughout are genuinely beautiful. The island is enormous and cold and indifferent in wide frame, and Friel keeps cutting back to it between the rotting interiors in a way that makes you feel the geography as a trap. You are being reminded constantly that the world does not know or care what is happening on this specific patch of it. Then at one point infected people arrive on shore in a swan pedal boat and the film does not acknowledge the absurdity even slightly. No wink. No comedic beat. Just the boat, the bodies, the slow drift in from the water.
The Verdict
Woken is messy in the way that interesting films get messy, not in the way that underfunded ones do. The second act has a stretch where the film is asking you to trust it before it has quite delivered the goods, and not everyone is going to give it that. I recommend giving it. The performances are strong, the production design is doing real thematic work rather than just dressing the frame, and the questions the film keeps raising about consent and survival and who gets to decide what counts as acceptable sacrifice are not grafted on as genre ornament. They are the film. Woken is the kind of sci-fi horror that respects your intelligence while going out of its way to disturb you, and it pulls both of those things off more often than not.
