Awake (2007)

Awake arrives from 2007 bearing a premise that a more excitable era might have called high concept: a young billionaire named Clay Beresford lies paralyzed on an operating table, chest cracked open, listening to his surgical team arrange his death. Joby Harold wrote and directed this in his debut, and the film's interest lies almost entirely in the mechanics of that cruel joke. The anesthesia awareness angle drew complaints from actual anesthesiologists, who objected to the science. The film's more durable flaw is that it treats a murder conspiracy as a family melodrama with a scalpel.

Hayden Christensen suffers handsomely. Jessica Alba plays Sam, the assistant and secret wife, and Terrence Howard plays the best friend who happens to be holding the poison. Lena Olin, as the mother, gets the only role with teeth, and she spends it on limousine confrontations and a self-sacrifice the screenplay treats as a plot convenience. The conspiracy runs on malpractice debts and an insurance payout, so a faint suggestion of money as a corrupting force drifts through the operating room. The film has no interest in pursuing it. The rich are a setting here, not a thesis.

The picture carries a faint residue of social awareness, the kind a thriller of its era likes to gesture at and then abandon. The cast is diverse by the standards of its moment, and the women drive the machinery of the plot, though the film frames both facts as casting decisions instead of arguments. Its conscience extends about as far as a stern look at a dishonest doctor. The remainder is a pulpy, mean little movie about a man who cannot move or speak while strangers decide whether he lives. It is not instructive. It is not trying to be. It simply wants to make you squirm, and on that modest charge it files a partial return.