Stay Awake (2022)

Stay-Awake-(2022)
Stay Awake (2022)

The story “Stay Awake” gives accounts of an addiction mainly from the caretaker’s perspective. This piece is written and directed by a debuting feature filmmaker Jamie Sisley. Jamie drew inspiration for the story from his life. It’s a muted, gentle drama set in a sleepy Virginia town with a relatively small population of 19,000. The place offers few opportunities for young people. Ethan (Wyatt Oleff) and his older brother, Derek (Steffan Fin Argus), are decent and bright motivated teenagers left with no choice but to stay invested in childhood. The brothers are psychologically shackled to Michelle (Chrissy Metz), their mother and an addict, making everything far more difficult than it already is. 

Derek, Ethan’s elder brother, has managed to secure himself a gig in the local commercials for acting. Ethan, an academic genius, is in high school and has multiple aspirations. In an ideal world, the only worries at hand would include a peculiar mix of anxiety and excitement that jumps in when getting on the adulthood stage. 

One major aspect to highlight is how the siblings deeply care for their mother and tenderly seek to help her by taking her to the emergency room after taking an overdose.

They belong in the lead of the family’s solitary automobile, where old tracks come alive and are sung to the mother on the trip to the hospital. All the while, the mother is seated at the back and in a slouch position. The kids on the other hand, make sure to point out each and every song in an attempt to prevent the mother from fading into oblivion. During these situations, the film does well to show all the efforts that are put into taking care of her. There is a scene that showcases Ethan stopping at an ice cream store where Quinn McColgan, his girlfriend, works. During this moment, Ethan notices his friend Mark (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper) sitting outside with people at a booth. Although they are not speaking, his thoughts are evident–‘I should be with them, but mom.’ These further escalate when the family suffers an accident while heading to the clinic. The merge showcases, what is perhaps the strongest element of the film, the family’s problems set within the context of an unmerciful America. 

This particular collision destroys the single vehicle owned by the family, resulting in them needing to rely on public transport at the same time that Michelle is beginning her recovery.

The facility is government owned and is the only one affordable to them. It is practically ‘rehab at half price’. Michelle asks the director and head counselor (Jones Albert) on her visit whether it is correct that they have a yoga room. He has to notify her that while there is a room that used to be a yoga studio, it had to be converted into a space for a replacement boiler the brothers bought after terminating their yoga instructor. The brothers had been to see a much nicer place but scrapped it after learning it cost $800 a day. “There is a discount of five percent for those families that require some form of financial aid,” the director said to them.

That is how their mother who is rehabilitating herself, can get treatment for free if she were committed to a psych ward, but there would be the need to show that she actually tried to harm herself. “She’s not out of her mind,” Ethan states regarding Derek. “She doesn’t try to eat her own poop or throw it around. They will be better off in rehab.” This then transitions into a scene of Michelle sitting alone in the bathroom, hearing her sons speak about her. She suffers from an abandoned, ashamed look of a woman whose very existence is a burden to the rest.

The film looks as though it is trying to avoid addressing certain issues. Both addiction and recovery need tremendous effort from both sides, and they have to inflict pain on others in their circle. There must be a rougher, harsher, and more nice version of the cover story. As for the screenplay sometimes it, too, is quite painfully honest and too much like a network television sitcom in the ways the characters speak to one another. Consider the moment in which Ashley verbally attacks Ethan after learning that he would much rather attend the Ivy League school than the one to which she is so keen to go. (She has a mends his emotions list of complaints to yell out to him; it’s one of those “I’m going to politely dress somebody down” moments that are dialed for maximum audience appreciation in a sitcom). 

For the most part, however, “Stay Awake” is unassuming and credible in the setting of the actors as they traverse normal settings while performing the mundane things in their lives.

Cinematographer Alejandro Mejia’s work is full of what appear to be ‘guerrilla’ shots. Speaking of beauty, the directors have an eye for areas that one may not think is beautiful, like the junkyard overflowing with scrap heaps or even the bowling alley where Derek takes his girlfriend Melanie (Cree) out on a date. He turns off the overhead lights so that only the orange and blue from the sign illuminates their food.

It is correct to say that the tales of all addiction revolve around similar plots. But, this is also the case for the stories of naive adolescent volunteers who go to war and come back traumatized by the brutalities and pointlessness of war, undercover police officers who get too attached to the criminals they are assigned to catch, and even for the romantically involved who, despite different life experiences, manage to get deeply attached to one another and then separate because they are unable to completely reconcile their differences. The crux is how much everything becomes alive with the detail of setting, character psychology, and all those elements that make a moment tangible. For example, from the beginning, the viewer observes the intimate details and is introduced to a world where Mike’s wife, Michelle, is preparing for his emergency room visit while frying carrots and onions. 

It is, for one, quite uplifting to encounter a recount of healing where the focus of attention is placed on the people around an addict who put in a lot of efforts to deal with the mess created by the addict (although Michelle does deal with the pain of her two boy’s cheating father issues). “Stay Awake” believes that while majority of people, together with their caretakers, try to give a positive impression, there is no reason to think that things become any easier. When the politeness disappears, the beauty of the film becomes brutally true.

“Everything that we do for her gets flung back in our faces,” tells Ethan to Derek, it is an absolute false claim but testifies the ease of which a family is able to remain frustrated by the hurdles beseeching them to make progress.

For More Movies Like Stay Awake (2022) Visit 123Movies

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top