Wide Awake 2007 Genius Products   Buy It Now

Korean cinema just apparently shows no sign of giving up anytime soon with their desire to make horror films and thrillers. I still recall that great feeling when a new piece of Asian horror would show up which has slowly eroded away and turned to disgust. Let’s face it, most of the good horror films have been licensed already and at this point, we’re really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. At least this Korean film doesn’t feature some irate ghost returned from the dead and looking for revenge.

Wide Awake at first seems to be focused no the premise of anesthesia awareness, also known as unintended intra-operative awareness, but it quickly casts that idea aside in favor of others. Dr. Jae-U Ryu (Myung-Min Kim) has been harassed by the husband of a former patient that is blaming him for the death of his wife. Even his wife, Hui-Jin Seo (Yoo Mi Kim) is feeling a bit uneasy but when she has to undergo surgery because of a mysterious foreign body and dies in the process, it soon becomes evident that it’s a case of murder. However, the man that Jae-U Ryu thinks hospitalized his wife in the first place soon turns up dead and now he must put together the pieces to find out just who is responsible and why.

Like quite a few of the Korean films that have been released recently, Wide Awake is a movie that would barely make the cut as a horror film and instead falls into place as being much more of a thriller. While you’d think that this might be a nice change of pace when there have been far too many horror movies released, it’s really nothing of the sort. Wide Awake turns into a rather predictable, shallow, and cliché movie that is more melodramatic than anything else.

Little by little the movie begins to connect the recent events to those of the past, all going back to a previous surgery years ago with a young boy who, while going under the knife, experienced anesthesia awareness and while he tried to tell everyone of his experience, no one believed him. Eventually we would see him turning to killing small animals and finally a young girl, all by the age of ten. How does this connect? The young psycho now works in the hospital and the movie takes plenty of opportunities to try and replay the events of his life, all with a sepia overlay that might work as a nice way to distinguish past and present, but it ultimately becomes a cluttered mess.

Uk-Hwan Gang (Jun-Sang Yoo), a former childhood friend of Jae-U Ryu also shows back up in his life, and the plot wants to try and point the finger in his direction, though it never does so successfully even when the truth is very evident. Wide Awake wants to try and misdirect viewers, and it does this often, but each and every possible suspect seems completely unreasonable. Even when the real killer is revealed at long last, his involvement is even a little perplexing and it isn’t until all the clues fall into place that it makes a slight bit of sense. However, Wide Awake seems to want to take too much time to try and get to its ultimate plot point and even longer to try and finally wrap it all up.

The one who really should have gone under the knife isn’t found within the movie itself, but rather, it is the movie. There are some scenes that felt as though they were pushed entirely longer than they needed to be in an attempt to give the movie a slight, dramatic feeling. Adding in extraneous shots for no reason but to lengthen the overall running time is something that should be abolished and although Wide Awake isn’t nearly as overkill as some other films, at nearly two hours in length, it could have been perfectly fine if it had been trimmed by about 30 minutes or so.

Another commonality that I’ve seen with one too many Asian imports is that when it comes to additional features, it’s not always easy to get more out of the country than just a making of and a look at the trailer. Wide Awake tries to go a bit further than just these things, minus the trailer. There is a making of feature, but it goes the way of many of these “features” and includes a number of onset shots that don’t include much in the way to explain what’s going on. There is a look at the production design as well as interviews with the cast but they are both rather run-of-the-mill. You also can learn a bit about anesthesia awareness and finally, there are some deleted scenes. Overall, it’s really not horribly impressive, but at least Wide Awake goes a little above and beyond.

Horror film, thriller, murder-mystery . . . Korean cinema really isn’t providing much that we haven’t seen already. Wide Awake at least isn’t some no-so-creative “remake” or rehash of a Japanese movie, but it still really doesn’t bring much with it that would make it memorable. Actually, the movie does manage to get it’s point across in one way since I felt like I was under the effect anesthesia awareness myself and if it had only been more effective, I might have slept through the whole thing.

-mike-