Mike Flanagan directed the film Before I Wake, an American horror fantasy based around a couple and the horrors they experience after adopting a child from an orphanage. The movie stars Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane as the married couple, Jessie and Mark Hobson, who, after some hard decisions, end up adopting a child from a foster home. Not the best decision of their lives.
Young actor Jacob Tremblay is also cast in the film as Cody Morgan, the child that uproots the lives of his adoptive parents. Topher Bousquet is a part of the movie as the Canker Man, along with Lance E. Nichols as Detective Brown.
The movie is also known by its other name, Somnia, mostly used for its international release. Before I Wake had its viewers feel skeptical about the entire plot of exploring a child’s nightmares and a child being the cause of the hauntings in the house. This concept is a bit cliche and overdone.
But this film does it well, making it seem refreshing while also introducing a new perspective. This time, the parents care about the child and his health instead of just being an ignorant, scared bunch.
Before I Wake is about a couple losing their young son, causing them to adopt a child instead of having another baby. Cody, a seemingly normal kid, catches their attention, and the paperwork gets processed. The movie takes the slow-burn route to explore the fact that something is unsettling about him.
Cody can turn his dreams, his nightmares more precisely, into a terrifying reality while he is asleep.
Before I Wake Ending Explained
The movie starts with an intense scene where a man armed with a gun enters a room leading to chaos and firing a bullet. The sound of the fire wakens a child, who immediately causes the man to get on his knees to start bawling. We skip some years and find our couple, Jessie and Mark, who have lost their young child, Sean, to an accident, in a foster home looking for their next child.
They come across Cody, relatively young, just eight years old, with bad luck in getting adopted. The faculty in the home tells Jessie and Mark about the death of Cody’s mother due to cancer and how his previous two adoption trials failed. She painted such a sad pressure only some heartless person would ignore the kid’s puppy eyes.
The three come home, and Cody finally has a pair of his parents. The first night Cody spends with them, he lets Jessie know about his Canker Man horror story, which you would want Jessie to believe and do something about it because you know this will come back. But Jessie, like a normal parent, brushes it off as Cody’s wild child-like imagination.
The same night the couple finds their living room is taken over by beautiful butterflies, which Mark tries to bring to Cody, but the moment the boy wakes up, they vanish completely. In the coming days, Cody conjures Sean in his sleep. The parents, obviously still not over his death, cry and try to touch him.
They catch on pretty soon that Cody has power, and Jessie tries to use it to meet Sean again, against Mark’s wishes. It was fine till now, but Cody, while asleep, once in school, manifested the Canker Man, who killed a child.
Superpower Effects
Things get really serious when Jessie, obsessing over Cody’s abilities to bring Sean back to him, tries to mix sleeping pills in Cody’s dinner. Mark had never agreed to this, and he wanted to love Cody for who he was and not because he had some abilities. But, clearly, his bad luck completely overpowered his goodness because when Cody slept, he dreamt of Sean in a sinister way.
What initially was Sean turns into the Canker Man, and he goes for Mark, killing him without leaving any evidence of it. Jessie had fainted through all of this, and Cody could not wake up even if he wanted to. Jessie finds the child’s services at her doorstep, and with Mark ‘missing,’ they suspect Jessie of inflicting abuse onto Cody, and he is taken away.
Through some illegal ways, Jessie, desperate to get Cody back, locates and contacts Cody’s previous foster parents. A guy named Whealy Young appears, who also happens to be the man with the gun in the film’s first scene.
He tells her about his dead wife and how Cody had brought her back to him, but she turned out to be an empty shell. Cody can only bring up people in his dreams, not bring them back to life, and these people do not realize that. Young thought the only way to stop Cody from having nightmares was to kill him.
The Truth Behind
He pushes Jessie to try to kill him, but thankfully she refuses. She gets her hands on a box full of Cody’s belongings, a butterfly pillow, and his mother’s journal. She returns to the orphanage where Cody is, only to find it covered in vines and leaves.
The place is dark, with the other kids tied up in a corner. The Canker Man also seems to be present, and when he moves to land an attack on Jessie, she pushes the butterfly pillow toward his face, which takes him aback. She hugs the monster, only for it to turn into Cody, and the orphanage returns to its original self.
The duo returns home, and Jessie reads his mother’s journal to him to let him know he is loved and wanted. It hits her that the Canker Man might just have been an exaggerated version of his dead mother, there only to protect him.
They shared similarities of being pale, thin, and disfigured because of her cancer. Jessie finally appreciates Cody for his precious existence and powers, but mostly just him, and in return, Cody also accepts Jessie as his mother.
One thing that has to be appreciated in the movie is Cody’s character. Where most kids in horror films turn out to be the evil force behind the terrifying acts, Cody is a sweet and loving kid still under the protection of his dead mother.
Jessie’s late realization of not forcing the child to bring up someone already dead costs Mark his life, making it difficult to call the movie a perfect happy ending. The reason behind Cody’s nightmare and the Canker Man being his dead mother felt like a heartwarming touch to his already very story.
The thing with Before I Wake is that it does not feel like much of a horror movie. The producers could have introduced so many layers of depth in Cody’s nightmares, but the way it all boils down to his mother’s death feels too cliched.
Final Thoughts
The horror part of the film is not all that scary, either. Natalie, the social worker who introduced the couple to Cody, tells them about his sad backstory, and it is easy to guess where the story would go. But the way the movie has portrayed Cody’s trauma of losing his mother to cancer at such a young age is another thing nice about it.
Incorporating his fears and trauma into his dreams, having physical similarities between his dead mother and the Canker Man, and the callback to the butterflies in the first dream sequence are all aspects that make the film more of a psychological thriller turned drama rather than a dark horror fantasy. Even so, these minute details have to be appreciated.
Jessie hugging the Canker Man turns out to be the only thing that was needed to fix things around. We realize that the young boy had been holding on to the memories of his mother and her death so tightly, but they were still so suppressed that this was probably the only way to express themselves.
Cody’s ability to bring his dreams to reality when sleeping is an actual power that he possesses, and it was only the trauma that was causing things to turn out the way they were. With the way the movie ended, we can see subtle underlying commentary on how, due to circumstances, negative memories, or even our unconscious, we may twist our realities, affecting us and those around us.
Also Read: American Horror Story Review: Is It Worth A Watch?
