By Terry Sherwood
Nathan Shepka’s Dead Before They Wake is a gritty look into the underbelly of Glasgow’s criminal underworld. This picture revels in its grimness, offering a bleak and moral narrative that brings to mind many Brit Box and Acorn television series for those of us in North America. Shepka not only stars but also co-directs with Andy Crane and writes the script, much the same as he did in his recent horror, release Baby in the Basket.
The film opens with Alex (Shepka), a bouncer at a Glasgow nightclub, breaking up an attempted sexual assault of a drugged female and some hooligan. He does so in the seventies “Charles Bronsons” tradition of using a baseball bat with unrelenting fury on the two men. One learns that Alex is a man with a solitary life in who lives in a caravan in a park. He visits his ailing deaf father who communicates through Sign language in a nursing home He spends his earnings on sexual favors with Gemma (Grace Cordell), a teacher who moonlights as a stripper and sex worker. Gemma has an attachment for what seems to be the lost soul of Alex.
His life is one bleak series of events punctuated by moments of violence and searching for someone to spend his life with. This all changes when he is approached by Evan (Sylvester McCoy), a retired lawyer who offers Alex a large sum of money to find a missing girl, Bianca (Rebekah Clark), who may have fallen victim to human traffickers. The girl is the child of an ongoing affair that a prominent politician had and must be kept out of the papers for fear of blackmail by the mother.
What follows is a descent into Glasgow’s criminal underworld, a journey that involves drugs, and underage trick pads controlled chiefly by disenfranchised white people and people of color. The Glasgow they present is a city of physical and moral decay, where every character Alex encounters is compromised in some way. From the overtly villainous Amar (Manjot Sumal) to Mr. Holden (Patrick Bergin), the people seem trapped in this world yet revel in its slime.
In the film’s most harrowing sequences, a young girl Chloe (Emily Crawley) is stalked by a cab driver after accepting late-night ride after a visit with a classmate. The cab driver picks up his mate, who proceeds to taunt Chloe with party invites booze, drug use and sex. Chloe escapes the vehicle, resulting in a well-executed harrowing foot chase through a dim urban neighborhood.
The film’s characters have their moral ambiguity. Alex himself is a flawed protagonist, a man whose military background has left him well-equipped for violence but emotionally stunted. His interactions with the various figures he meets in his search for Bianca are layered with tension and unease, as it becomes increasingly clear that everyone has their agenda. The cab driver who picks up Chloe is himself a father who forbids his own child from going to parties, wearing make-up and possibly drinking.
The violence in Dead Before They Wake is practical in style and does not feel gratuitous. Instead, it serves to underscore the film’s themes of desperation and moral decay. A sequence of note is a close-quarters knife fight, which looks exciting, yet one can see these are not fighters as the sequences look too planned in certain points. The physical action in The Baby in the Basket was also a letdown from the atmosphere of the film. Good try, but still awkward.
Dead Before They Wake is more concerned with the emotional and psychological toll of its story. The climactic shootout, fire and odd battle result in a bleak end near the river works. However, the script, particularly in the second half and final acts get bogged down with odd moments, plot holes, and strange dialogue that at some point you are viewing a moment going how did I get here? The film itself is fifteen minutes too long and deserves to be tightened.
Dead Before They Wake is available now on Digital Platforms.
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