Give a squad a target and send them into the jungle, and I’m willing to follow them a pretty long way. The Awakening gets that part right. An elite Colombian military unit has orders to kill a man in territory where Spanish conquistadors encountered something supernatural 500 years earlier. The soldiers have a job to do. We have good reason to worry about what they might wake up doing it. That’s enough to carry a first act, and for a while I was having a good time.
What interested me about bringing the conquistadors into the story was the possibility that knowing what happened to them would change how I saw the soldiers. Five centuries apart, two armed groups enter the same stretch of jungle, each pretty sure they know what they’ve come to do. There’s a good horror movie in that idea. I’m inclined to give a film some room to stumble when it tries something this ambitious, especially when it would have been easy enough to let something loose in the trees and call it a day.
The Jungle Holds Up After the Mission Loses Steam
After the first act, though, I started to miss the simplicity of the mission. Early on, I wanted to know what would happen to the people in front of me. Later, I’d just about settle back in with the squad when the film would turn its attention elsewhere. The pace fell off, and the shifts between military action, historical horror, and the supernatural got harder to go along with. I could follow the connection between the two expeditions. What I kept losing was the tension.
By the ending, what I wanted was some of the urgency I’d felt at the start. The film had spent the better part of its running time building up what these men had walked into, and the payoff left me shrugging. I still enjoyed enough of The Awakening to recommend it for a particular kind of evening. If you’re in the mood for soldiers, a bad decision, and something nasty in the jungle, put it on. It’s a solid middle-of-the-road horror movie, and you can have a decent time with it without giving those five centuries too much thought.
The Awakening is available on digital in the U.S. through Well Go USA as of November 10, 2026.
Fan verdict and scores by iHorror
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