{"id":590806,"date":"2026-05-18T15:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T15:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590806\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T15:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T15:46:14","slug":"woken-review-shonky-post-apocalyptic-horror-sends-an-amnesiac-into-the-plague-zone-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590806\/","title":{"rendered":"Woken review \u2013 shonky post-apocalyptic horror sends an amnesiac into the plague zone | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, getting caught in one pandemic may be regarded as misfortune; getting caught in two looks like your agent may be keen on riding the post-Covid zeitgeist. After her turn as part of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal\u2019s posse in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple<\/a>, Erin Kellyman makes another plague outing in this good-looking but ineffective post-apocalyptic thriller (originally made in 2023).<\/p>\n

Kellyman\u2019s bewildered survivor Anna, waking up in a shabby cottage on an isolated island, doesn\u2019t even know she\u2019s in the midst of a pandemic at first. Amnesiac and heavily pregnant, she has to trust grinning neighbour Helen (Maxine Peake) when she says Anna has had a bad fall and that James (Ivanno Jeremiah) \u2013 also prone to smiling a bit too much \u2013 is her husband. It\u2019s only when a swan-shaped pedalo boat deposits a pair of crustacean-faced, infected castaways, and her seemingly lovely friends shoot and burn them, that she begins to realise this is no island paradise.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Framed by brooding shale cliffs and magnifying Anna\u2019s fragility indoors, as she pores over dead tortoiseshell butterflies and repulsive lobster dinners, Alan Friel\u2019s debut follows in the social-realist Brit sci-fi tradition of Never Let Me Go and Children of Men. It\u2019s also well acted across the board, especially the wide-eyed, floundering Kellyman and the always authoritative Peake, who is charged with concealing the truth of Anna\u2019s situation. It\u2019s a bit of a mystery, then, why Woken never really gels.<\/p>\n

The first half covers up some tepid domestic parlour games by prettifying them with seagrass-fringed impressionism, while the second half shifts the needle towards more strident sci-fi, with clandestine labs, ligament-weaving surgery units and fascistic hazmat squads. But the conspiracy Anna uncovers and her gun-toting exit feel regurgitated, while the film\u2019s overlapping ambience with Children of Men rapidly becomes a certifiable debt. Woken might believe it\u2019s on an island apart, but sadly that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n

Woken is available on digital platforms from 25 May<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, getting caught in one pandemic may be regarded as misfortune; getting caught in two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-590806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}