‘Stay Awake’ (2022) Review: A New Perspective in Addiction Stories
Most films depict addicts as villains, however, Jamie Sisley’s Stay Awake explores how the epidemic of drug addiction can affect caretakers. Instead of the familiar route, Sisley highlights an alternative perspective by showing the audience what caretakers go through, emotionally and physically, to take care of their loved ones. In the movie, the nuances of addition aren’t romanticised. They understand the struggles of battling addiction and how it affects their families. The truth is the road to recovering isn’t always linear. It’s a complex story that shows the humanity of drug addicts, while also revealing how much care and love it takes to look after someone. In a way, Stay Awake is a love letter to caretakers. It’s an honest and brutal movie that shows drug addiction as a disease and how it impacts a family.
The film begins with Ethan (Wyatt Oleff) walking up to his brother, Derek’s (Fin Argus) work unannounced and then without a single word exchanged between them, they leave to find their mother, Michelle (Chrissy Metz). By the looks of it, Derek and Ethan have been through this before and they cruise around to find her around town. They find her stumbling around an alley and put her in the car and drive to the hospital in the middle of the night. On the way to their destination, it’s quiet. In the back seat, Michelle is dozing off. Derek and Ethan try to keep her awake by playing a game of “guess the song” to make sure she doesn’t pass out. After Michelle finally recovers at the hospital, she goes back to her home to live with her family, but shortly after for her to fall back into the same terrible pattern.
Meanwhile, Ethan and Derek struggle to take care of their mother, pay the bills and work. There isn’t much to do in the small town, but the brothers find ways to keep themselves busy. After high school graduation, Derek stays back to take care of his family, while Ethan plans to leave home after getting an acceptance letter from Brown University. However, due to Michelle’s debilitating drug addiction, they are unable to find other help, so they put her in a rehab centre which costs more than they can afford. As Ethan and Derek pick up more shifts to pay for their mother’s rehab, they become more discontent with the burden of helping Michelle get better, especially for someone who doesn’t want to find a healthy passage.
Stay Awake shows the struggles of two young brothers grappling with the difficult task of taking care of their mother going through drug addiction. Throughout the movie, it reveals how the brothers have tried to put her in different rehab centres but failed to keep Michelle away from drugs for good. What is heartbreaking about the movie is that Michelle doesn’t want to be saved. It’s unclear whether she sees that the decisions she makes are a burden on her children, or maybe she does and it’s difficult for her to stop. Their family situation becomes a routine they are all too familiar with, and watching Michelle go down the path of self-destruction hurts her children more than she knows. Yet, they are the only ones who care about her.
Earlier in the movie, Ethan and Derek drive past the clinic and flip the middle finger at the office. The film shows Michelle’s drug problem started when a doctor prescribed the first bottle of drugs. When she visits the clinic for a check-up, he refills the prescription again. The doctor doesn’t seem to care about her health and wellbeing so she goes back to the same routine that the audience is now too familiar with, and thus she gets admitted to the rehab centre.
Since Michelle started getting admitted to the rehab centre, Ethan and Derek always had to think about their mother before themselves. They have spent their entire lives sacrificing their happiness and finances to take care of their mother, and when an opportunity comes by for Derek to go to an audition out of town, Ethan encourages him to go. However, it’s still difficult for them to change their lives. Ethan is angry at the situation. He loves and cares about his mother, but he realises there is so much that he can take from this situation. Ethan wants to have a life of his own, away from his family and not have to worry about whether his mother is alive or not.
Indeed, Sisley doesn’t villainise Michelle. He shows that it is perfectly acceptable to acknowledge that the mother is suffering from a disease. The director’s experience is the heart of this story as he grew up with a mother who was addicted to prescription drugs. There is an aspect that is humanly devastating about Michelle’s addiction and her children are paying the price for it. Stay Awake is written and told from Ethan and Derek’s perspective and it doesn’t shy away from their complex feelings. They wonder and argue about what would be the best option for Michelle, and sometimes things can get ugly. The movie hints at the possibility that Ethan and Derek might leave for the better as a way of ending this toxic cycle.
Stay Awake is an important movie that shows a heartbreaking and complicated journey of a family. For the brothers it is a wake-up call, even though the path to get to the stage was rough and took a lot of compromises. Metz, known for her role as Kate in This Is Us, is wonderful and uses humour to deflate the emotional moments. Oleff and Angus show a variety of emotions, from masking their characters’ sadness with smiles and laughter to making everything look normal. It’s a tragic story and ultimately, Michelle realises that she doesn’t want her children to go through a difficult life because she couldn’t take care of herself. Stay Awake is a refreshing perspective on how it can affect people’s lives and how every decision family makes comes with a cost, whether or not they wish to leave them behind or stay.
