Movie Review: 'Dead Before They Wake' Good Intentions in a Bad Movie

Dead Before They Wake

Directed by Andy Crane, Nathan Shepka

Written by Nathan Shepka

Starring Nathan Shepka, Sylvester McCoy

Release Date January 27th, 2025

Published January 23rd, 2025

Trigger Warning: This is a review of a movie about sex trafficking. And it’s not a good movie. With the success of such films as Taken and The Sound of Freedom, sex trafficking has become a topic that filmmakers find easy to dramatize and use as a prop around which to center action scenes. It’s easy for audiences to root for a hero who is blowing the heads off of sex traffickers. It’s the most basic, hacky, easy to dramatize thing in the world.

When it became out of fashion to have all of your stock villains be terrorists or Russians or Russian terrorists, a new action movie boogeyman was needed. And thus we got the vaguely Central European, heavily accented, overdosed on tattoo ink and weed, baddies who kidnap young girls to sell to rich creeps. It’s practically a cottage industry now in low budget action movie culture to put swarthy men in gold chains and track suits and call them sex traffickers. Why, I just wrote half of a direct to Netflix feature with just that description above.

I mention this because the movie I am writing about, Dead Before They Wake, is one of these low budget sex trafficking, exploitation movies. It’s a film that would like to wrap itself in the assumed nobility of a street smart thug whose code of ethics causes him to brutally murder sex traffickers in order to give the audience the vicarious thrill of seeing sex traffickers get their heads bashed in. No one can oppose this as a good thing. Sex traffickers need their heads bashed in, this is a universal truth. In fact, it’s such a universal truth that we don’t actually need movies like Dead Before They Wake to underline the point.

Dead Before They Wake is the vanity project of actor, writer, and co-director, Nathan Shepka. Nathan has good intentions. I have no reason to believe that he’s simply using sex trafficking as a plot point. In fact, the movie stops dead on multiple occasions to underline the point that sex trafficking, and the men who engage in it, are bad. The film has the main character watch a video in which victims of sex trafficking are interviewed about being victims of sex trafficking. That said, the film is so clumsily constructed that the scene implies that the documentary was made by sex traffickers to be shown to other sex traffickers.

Clumsy construction plagues the entirety of Dead Before They Wake which, at times, approaches Neil Breen levels of incompetence. It’s pathetic, but in a poignant way. You can sense the effort involved and admire Shepka and co-director Andy Crane for trying but they simply don’t appear to know what they are doing. The film is plagued with little errors like edits that come at the wrong moment, eyelines that fail to adhere to the simplest of technical competence, and lighting that renders the whole film tough to look at. I am no specialist when it comes to the technicalities of filmmaking, but I know enough to recognize when it isn’t done well.

And yet, I can’t be mad at Dead Before They Wake. The film appears to want to highlight the horrors of sex trafficking while unknowingly tumbling into exploitation of the subject. The film works hard to avoid much nudity and shoots around the sexual violence it portrays which tells me they didn’t want to exploit sex trafficking for cheap titillation. Sadly, there is a massive gulf between the noble action movie the filmmakers earnestly believe they are making and the desperately incompetent and accidentally exploitative movie that they did make.

Dead Before They Wake is a bad movie, objectively bad. It’s not well made. But, if I can give the filmmakers a little grace, they don’t seem to have set out with bad intentions. It’s the bare minimum you can ask of these filmmakers but I can give them that credit. There are far worse movies on Netflix and Amazon right now where sex trafficking is treated as an excuse for getting young women naked on screen and extreme violence against these women is treated like a marketing hook. I’d rather have a dozen Dead Before They Wake-like movies, than any of the many, many genuine exploitation films in the market.

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