Wake Up (Glasgow Frightfest 2024)(Review)

If the name “RKSS” sounds familiar to you, it’s likely because they were the French-Canadian trio responsible for 2015’s quirky post-apocalyptic gore-fest Turbo Kid – likely the stand-out title of the kids-on-bikes-sploitation wave that sprung up around the mid-2010s, when the world was caught in the grip of Stranger Things fever (Turbo Kid was, curiously enough, released a year prior to said streaming phenomenon). Short for “Roadkill Superstars”, RKSS is composed of François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell – three filmmakers who share a love of neon colour palettes, synthesizer scores, and paying homage to ‘80s video-store favourites. Yet what makes RKSS successful compared to many of their lesser counterparts is the complete lack of cynicism to their work; Turbo Kid is not intended to be some kind of half-hearted, “ironic” pastiche, but rather a sincere coming-of-age love story that is able to be goofy, grotesque and outlandish without ever giving the impression that its cast members are winking to the camera.

Following the underground success of Turbo Kid, RKSS have been responsible for three further genre features, the latest of which is Wake Up (2023), which premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest, and was one of the titles selected for the 2024 edition of Glasgow FrightFest. Wake Up follows the titular group of animal-masked Gen-Z activists on the night they execute their plan to break into their local branch of “Home Idea”, a furniture warehouse highly reminiscent of a certain real-world Swedish big-box store chain – meatballs and all. Armed with spray-cans and paintball guns, these TikTok-era rebels intend to vandalize as much stock as possible whilst the superstore is locked up for the night, as part of a protest against brand’s unsustainable environmental practices, with the wood in Home Idea’ furniture being sourced from mass deforestation in the Amazon; unfortunately for the youths, an unexpected and bloody altercation with one of the store’s security officers makes them all targets for the branch’s mentally unstable night guard Kevin (Turlough Convery), a “primitive hunting” enthusiast with his eyes now set on the most dangerous game. What follows is a nightmarish game of cat-and-mouse that features booby-traps, improvised weaponry, and a whole lot of mean-spirited mind-games, as the teens struggle to survive until dawn.

Obviously, there’s a lot of potential in Wake Up’s concept for socio-political commentary, but if you’re expecting any deep-cutting exploration of modern-day issues, from “greenwashing” to the complicated ethical dilemmas of activism in the age of social-media clout-chasing, you might want to keep your expectations low; these ideas are brought up, sure, but these themes are more of a flavour than the actual meat of the piece. Rather, Wake Up is an intense and unexpectedly gruelling horror-thriller that uses the topical hot-button issues of climate-consciousness and corporate cruelty as a means to make its action hit closer to home for an iPhone-generation audience; just as the war in Vietnam weighed upon the psyches of Sally Hardesty and her friends in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the growing threat of environmental catastrophe lingers over the teen leads of Wake Up.

The film’s action does take a moment to heat up, and you’re unlikely to find yourself immediately attached to any of Wake Up’s leads beyond their shared goal of climate justice, but once the bloodshed begins, you’ll feel for these activists like they were your own friends. This is a dark, mean, intense slasher, a riff on “The Hounds of Zaroff” that lies somewhere between Intruder (1989) and Slaxx (2020) in its construction of a retail night-shift nightmare, and one which makes superb use of its location. Death-traps are constructed from flat-pack furniture, box-cutter blades are fashioned into throwing stars, and the overhead speaker system is used by the killer to torment his victims with the tortured voices of their captured friends. It’s simultaneously brutal and delightful to see each showroom set-piece come into play, the highlight of the film being a sequence which involves our surviving leads being coated in glow-in-the-dark paint, resulting in a visually stunning (and utterly terrifying) effect.

This is a more restrained and serious beast than Turbo Kid, closer to RKSS’s bleak Shudder-exclusive nostalgia-trip Summer of ‘84 (2018) in tone, and yet it manages to be creative and, at times, visually extravagant in ways which many modern studio-backed horror films seem afraid to be. Wider audiences may not know what to make of Wake Up’s refusal to take prisoners in its unrepentant, decidedly non-mainstream nastiness, but I have a distinct feeling that festival crowds will lap it up wholeheartedly. As for me personally, I found it to be the kind of lean, mean genre thrill-ride that I’ve been missing for the past couple of years – one with a scary, socially-conscious edge to boot.

Robyn’s Archive – Wake Up (2023)