Dark Awakening-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: Danny's parents think his new imaginary friends are harmless until they learn the shocking truth of the new house.

There are times when I have the urge to watch a movie to pass the time. I won’t even check the synopsis of it. As long as it is horror, I’ll watch it, because hey, horror movies always have a component in it that will either scare or mystify you. It will have a hook and transport you away from your mundane existence.

Of course, some horror movies are unintentionally funny and plain nonsensical. But I’d still watch that rather than a movie that takes a bleak look at how unfair life is.

Cutting to the chase, Dark Awakening was actually, surprisingly good. It did have some low points but that comes toward the end. Until the film takes a rather abrupt turn in the second part of the second half, the story does have some interesting moments and the actors too do a decent job.

Just goes to show that you don’t need big stars and crazy CGI budget to make a decent horror movie. You need a good story, a good director, and good actors. Had the ending been tweaked a little, this movie would have been utterly remarkable.

Fortunately, the strength surpasses the flaws though it isn’t evident from the beginning.

DARK AWAKENING Movie Plot 

We are made to see a court case where the guilty get to walk away free. It cuts to a man in the courtroom who receives a phone call that his mother has passed away.

Naturally, he has inherited the manor his mother used to live in. Deciding to live there and fix it up to sell it off, he takes his wife and son there. The minute they enter the town, however, his son Danny becomes the center of attention of the citizens who are all seniors and keep staring at the boy.

The mother keeps her cool and not once asks them what their problem was? The father is oblivious to it all. When they reach the house, it is just as huge and you prepare for the atypical hauntings and “imaginary friends” that will attach themselves to the kid.

All that happens quickly. We see kids roaming about the house but they only contact the kid, who doesn’t know his new friends are ghosts out for revenge. The parents think its cute until one of the imaginary friends knocks over a glass at the dinner table.

The mother soon sees a boy in a checked shirt and when she goes to the newspaper office, finds a clipping of an article where nine kids had disappeared around the time her husband was living in town when he was a kid.

She hurries home only to come across an elderly couple in a car who keep staring at Danny and crash into a truck. She calls her friend/sister whoever she was in that five minutes of screentime. For some inexplicable reason, one of the ghosts come before the car and she too crashes the car and is killed.

The mother, still traumatized by the accident she witnessed, meets with the Father who keeps posting religious photos all around their house and surrounding area whenever he used to visit them for a cup of coffee.

The mother then learns the shocking truth of the house after she is hit violently by her husband.

DARK AWAKENING Ending Explained with Spoilers!

Turns out, ever since the husband was a kid, he had homicidal tendencies and used to kill animals at first. He slowly upgraded to killing humans and that is why the father goes into depression and asks his own son to pull the trigger on him which he happily does.

The kid uses bizarre ways to kill his friends and it up to his mother to bury the bodies and let people assume the children had disappeared. Where did she bury the kids? In the basement of course.

The place that is blocked off by plywood and wallpaper apparently that even their kid son was able to punch a hole through.

In the end, as the husband kills the Father and accepts and remember who he really was before the accident that put him in a coma and changed his behaviour, he decides to end his life.

Bricking up the entrance to the basement, he takes a gun and shoots himself with it.

Pretty decent movie up to the point where they show the son, Danny, also twisting and breaking the neck of a stray cat. Like father, like son.

Okay, that should have been the end. However, there is another end scene where the wife is crying uncontrollably in front of the new brick wall when the husband/ ghost husband, makes an appearance and tells her to quit her whining.

For me, that scene was overkill to a movie that had been pretty decent so far. Cliched haunted house yes, imaginary friends who are ghosts, yes. But terrible direction and shoddy special effects? Thankfully, no.

I was glad the movie didn’t rely on every single cliche and only kept the important ones. Yes, the concept may not be unusual or unique, but its execution makes it stand out from the other movies that lack substance.

Are the ghost children scary and are the hauntings spooky? Not really but the twist about the husband is creepy and hard to watch. Regardless of everything, at least the movie ties up all loose ends toward the end and sometimes all we need in a horror movie is clarity and satisfaction.

Scary scale: 3/5