Ten Years On, Cody’s Dreams Still Rewrite Reality in Before I Wake

Mike Flanagan’s Before I Wake is a slow-burning horror film built on grief, guilt and a boy whose dreams rewrite reality. It wants to be a tragedy about a family trying to love a child they can’t protect. It mostly gets there, though the payoff arrives late and the middle stretches thin.

Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane play Jessie and Mark Hobson, a couple whose son Sean drowned years earlier. They take in Cody Morgan, an 8-year-old foster child whose mother died of cancer when he was three. The setup is simple: Cody’s dreams and nightmares manifest physically as he sleeps. What follows is a series of apparitions, a killer butterfly, and a monster that feeds on children.

Trailer, via Netflix.

The Gift That Won’t Stay Hidden

The film’s central trick is Cody’s ability to bring his subconscious into the world. He falls asleep at school, and Tate, a cruel classmate, is devoured by a monstrous creature called “the Canker Man.” Annie, a girl Cody befriends, watches in horror and screams, waking him up. That sequence lands. It is tense, specific, and genuinely disturbing.

But the gift also becomes a trap. Jessie mixes prescription medication with Cody’s drink without telling Mark. That night, Sean appears again, this time resembling the Canker Man, and Mark cannot wake Cody. The monster devours him, and the scene is as grim as it sounds.

Jessie and Mark, Two Sides of Grief

Bosworth plays Jessie as brittle and desperate, a woman who has stopped moving through her days and now clings to a boy she barely knows. Jane plays Mark as a man who wants to fix things but cannot stop himself from making them worse. Their arguments feel real, not staged. The tension between them is the film’s best engine.

Jacob Tremblay, as Cody, carries the emotional weight of a boy who has lost everything. His performance is quiet and steady, a child who understands more than he can say. Annabeth Gish, as social worker Natalie Friedman, is the film’s moral center, a woman who knows the system is broken and does her best anyway.

The Butterfly Scene and Its Limits

The film’s most striking image comes early: butterflies of every color flutter across the Hobsons’ living room. Mark tries to catch a blue one to show Cody, who loves butterflies. When Cody wakes up, the butterflies are gone. It is a beautiful moment, and it sets the tone for what follows. But the film spends too long circling back to Cody’s gift without building new stakes around it.

A Premise That Runs Out of Room

The problem is pacing. The first half moves slowly, establishing the Hobsons’ grief and Cody’s history. The second half accelerates, but the acceleration is uneven. Some scenes land with force; others drift. The film is 97 minutes long, and the final act feels rushed, as if Flanagan and Jeff Howard were chasing a deadline rather than a climax.

The film’s tagline, “Fear your dreams,” is accurate. Cody’s dreams are the threat, and the film treats them with genuine dread. But the fear is diluted by a middle stretch that could have been tighter. The result is a movie that is often effective but rarely gripping.

The Canker Man Arrives Too Late

The Canker Man, introduced in Cody’s first nightmare, does not appear until the film’s final stretch. That is a deliberate choice, and it works in theory. In practice, the monster’s arrival feels less like a payoff and more like a sudden shift in tone. The film builds dread only to release it quickly, and the release does not fully satisfy.

The film’s structure is a double helix of grief and horror, each loop feeding the other. Jessie’s guilt over Sean’s death drives her to seek comfort in Cody’s company. That comfort, in turn, makes her complicit in the danger she fears. The film tracks both loops with care, even when the pacing falters.

Key Facts

• Title: Before I Wake (also known as Somnia in some territories)
• Director: Mike Flanagan
• Writer: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard
• Runtime: 97 minutes
• Release: Premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 31, 2016; released on Netflix in the United States on January 5, 2018
• Box office: Grossed over $4.9 million worldwide
• Critical score: 6.5/10

Release Timeline

Final Verdict

Before I Wake is a flawed but promising debut from Mike Flanagan. It handles grief with care, and its central idea is genuinely unsettling. But the pacing drags in the middle, and the climax arrives too late to fully justify the build. Bosworth and Jane anchor a strong ensemble, and Tremblay delivers a performance that will likely be remembered long after the film itself fades.

The film is worth seeing for its ambition and its moments of genuine horror. It is not worth sitting through its slower stretches, which test patience more than they reward it. The Canker Man deserves better than to arrive so late. As a whole, Before I Wake is a film that reaches for greatness and catches a shadow of it.

horror · Mike Flanagan · movie review · Netflix · supernatural thriller