You’d be hard-pushed to find a teenager alive who wouldn’t jump at the chance to let loose in an empty IKEA, after dark. Especially when there’s paintballs and mass destruction on the cards. So it’s no surprise that RKSS stage such a fantasy, as the set-up for their Gen Z focussed somewhat-slasher; a half-baked cautionary tale on vapid activism, with a particularly gnarly killer at the helm.
The directorial collective, otherwise known as Canadian trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, are well-loved on the genre circuit. Heroes of ’80s pastiches Turbo Kid and Summer of 84 (the latter of which offers one of the most memorably downbeat finales of almost any horror this side of the millennium), their latest, Wake Up, is certainly more of a move towards the present. Doing away with much of the team’s stylish neon and bigger production values, for a very scrappy, self-contained and decidedly duller blood-and-guts flick.
Also gone are their more doe-eyed, Stand By Me-cum-Stranger Things-esque teen protagonists. Replaced with an unusually underdeveloped gang of much rowdier climate activists, who storm a “big box furniture store” just after closing, tagging its showrooms and staging a giant game of paintball, while sharing their politically-motivated antics on social media. But unluckily for them, a potentially dangerous survivalist (a terrifying Turlough Convery) has just been given the job of night watchman, and he takes his job very seriously indeed.
What follows is an awful lot of flatpack-themed bloodletting, with some clever Saw-style traps and a tense (if slightly repetitive) cat-and-mouse game around the fun setting. Convery is a real force of nature as the deeply troubled watchman, and his sudden descent into murderous rage is well built by Alberto Marini’s script.
Where things start to falter though is in just how weak the central gang of teenagers are, landing much more as bait for an exciting killer, than likeable heroes in their own right. Their half-formed relationships are a struggle to understand, and their overall intentions – while purposefully mixed-up and not totally well-meaning – come off as more of a failed opportunity over anything else.
After all, not all of Gen Z are the sort of politically-aggressive, straight-out-the-womb activists the media often paints them as. But that certainly hasn’t stopped it becoming something of a caricature for the emerging generation, on film. The idea of a whole wave of young people, slowly waking up to just how badly screwed they are, lumped with expensive everything and a planet that’s limping towards a climate disaster, is maybe too depressing for a fun genre romp. So it’s just as valid to paint this new breed of ‘rebel’ teenagers as more two-dimensional disrupters; granola slinging middle class kids with nice lives, who protest for image over any real desire for proper political upheaval.
But here we don’t really get either, and the result is something that feels frustratingly vapid considering its context. It’s fine to criticise a potentially nefarious group, but Wake Up isn’t really pro- or anti- anything, using the moniker of activism as just a fairly loose bit of staging, to get its prey into the path of its more dramatically interesting predator.
And while as a straight-up, switch-your-brain-off good time, Wake Up just about does the trick, it really feels like RKSS are missing an open goal here. Despite what Garth Marenghi might say, subtext isn’t just for cowards.
Wake Up was screened as part of FrightFest Glasgow 2024.
