Awoken

Awoken follows Karla, a young medical student who refuses to give up on her dying brother, Blake. Blake suffers from Fatal Familial Insomnia, a rare illness that slowly destroys the body because the patient cannot sleep. Karla moves him into a hidden treatment room beneath a hospital, where an older doctor leads a secret experiment. The film becomes a dark, closed-in horror story when the illness appears to let a demon enter the patients.

Karla begins as an atheist who trusts medicine, but old tapes link her family’s deaths to a priest, a demon, and a failed sleep trial. She must face the idea that Blake needs an exorcism instead of a medical cure. The main themes are family loyalty, grief, fear of inherited illness, faith, and the limits of human knowledge. The film also gives its women serious roles and avoids treating them as decoration, but it does not build the story around gender, race, sexuality, or modern political causes.