Exclusive Trailer: The Awakening Makes a Modern Military Unit Repeat a 500-Year-Old Mistake

A modern military unit heads into the Colombian jungle on a kill order and walks straight into the nightmare that swallowed a Spanish conquistador expedition 500 years earlier.

The exclusive trailer opens like a straight military thriller. A helicopter cockpit. A voice laying out the drop point. Rifle optics sweeping through jungle so dense the frame is mostly black. An aerial shot finds a small camp cut into the canopy, and someone says, “That’s the place they warned us about.” The order comes down to neutralize the target. For a few seconds this looks like a movie about soldiers doing a job.

Then something moves in the brush.

The squad can’t see what’s out there and neither can we. Shapes slip between the trees. Somebody yells “Contact! They’ve got us surrounded!” and the screen fills with muzzle flashes and panic. Nobody seems sure what they’re shooting at. Someone shouts into a radio asking if anyone copies. Then comes the question the rest of the trailer is built on: “What were those things?”

The Jungle Remembers

That’s where it pulls its best trick. The rifles give way to torches. A different group of men moves through the same jungle and into caves with carvings on the walls, and they look like they walked out of the 1500s. Same warning. Same place. Five centuries apart.

As for the beast, the trailer is smart enough to keep it mostly offscreen. You get pale shapes lunging through torchlight, faces twisted in panic, someone screaming that they’re about to be torched alive and then a blast of fire. By the time a soldier says “They awakened the beast,” you still haven’t gotten a clean look at it. In a jungle this dark I’d rather wonder anyway.

Jaime Osorio Márquez directs with Federico Durán and José Luis Rugeles. The film was nominated for Best Feature Film at the 2026 Guadalajara International Film Festival. Well Go USA Entertainment releases The Awakening on Digital November 10, 2026, with Blu-ray and DVD following December 15. It runs about 96 minutes and is not rated.

Watch the exclusive trailer below.