Before I Wake (2016)

Before I Wake (2016) Full Recap

The movie starts in a dark, messy house. A man walks slowly up the stairs holding a gun and stops beside a little boy asleep in his bed. His hands are shaking and sweat runs down his face. He points the gun at the sleeping child for a long time, but he can't pull the trigger. He breaks down, crying instead, right there in the dark.

Somewhere else, a grieving couple named Jesse and Mark Hopson sit nervously across from a social worker named Natalie. They're about to become foster parents, and they've just been approved. Natalie tells them about an 8-year-old boy named Cody. His mother died when he was three. The first family she placed him with wasn't fit, and the second family abandoned him.

When she went to check on him, she found him living alone in the apartment, and he'd been on his own for almost a month. At home, Jesse takes down photo after photo of a little boy and packs them into boxes. The boy is their son, Shawn. He drowned in a terrible accident and Jesse and Mark have been falling apart ever since.

In the end, they leave just one picture on the wall. At her grief support group, Jesse tells everyone that they're bringing a child home tomorrow. The group leader, Peter, congratulates her, but Jesse admits she still can't sleep at night without pills, and the color hasn't come back into the world. Mark stopped coming to these meetings a long time ago, and the two of them hardly talk about Shawn anymore.

She wishes she knew how to fix things between them. She tells the group this room is the only place where she feels awake. The next morning, Natalie brings Cody to their house. He's a quiet little boy in a school sweater holding a box he won't let anyone carry. The first thing he does is take off his shoes at the door.

Because shoes make floors dirty, he says. Jesse and Mark exchange a look. This kid has learned to be careful. Mark gets excited and shows him the Xbox with the motion sensor, swinging his arms around to make the little guy on the screen move. Cody watches him like he's never seen a grown-up act silly before.

Then they show Cody his new bedroom. Natalie mentions that Cody collects butterflies. Cody looks around at the empty shelves, and for the first time, the boy smiles. That night, Jesse tucks him in. Cody looks up at her and says he likes her eyes because they're really pretty. Jesse is so touched she can barely answer.

She tells him good night and turns off the light and Cody stares at the ceiling trying to stay awake. On his first day at school, the teacher has the whole class say welcome to Cody and he takes the seat she points to. Outside, Jesse sits in her car in the parking lot just watching the building. She tells herself she only wants to make sure she can still hear him.

Losing one child has made her terrified of losing another, even for a few hours. That evening, Mark looks through Cody's butterfly books. Cody points out his favorite, the blue morpho. Mark jokes that it sounds like a superhero. Then Cody shows him a picture of a chrysalis and explains that it keeps the butterflies safe until they're grown up.

Mark listens like it's the most interesting thing he's ever heard. But Jesse found something under his bed. A stash of sugar and caffeine pills. Anything that keeps him awake. Cody admits he doesn't like to sleep because when he sleeps, the canker man comes. He eats people. Cody says he ate my mom.

Jesse sits on the edge of the bed and tells him a story. When she was a little girl, she thought a witch was scratching at her window every night. Then she found out it was just a tree branch hitting the glass in the wind, and the witch never came back. Cody shakes his head. The canker man is always with him, and he says so himself.

Later that night, Jesse and Mark are watching an old movie on the couch when glowing butterflies start floating through the living room. There are dozens of them, every color, glowing like tiny lamps and flying right past their faces. Mark runs to get a jar so he can catch one for Cody, and he swears one of them bit his finger. Then, all at once, every butterfly disappears into thin air, and the room goes dark again.

Upstairs, Cody has just woken up. At her next group meeting, Jesse says she saw something strange that night and she thinks it was Shawn. Maybe he's angry that they brought another boy into the house. Peter gently explains that grief and lack of sleep can cause waking dreams. You said you uh saw him sometimes.

He tells her every person in a dream is really just a piece of ourselves and that Shawn is not haunting her home. The real question is what she's trying to tell herself. At school, Cody makes his first friend, a sweet girl named Annie. He shows her a monarch butterfly and tells her everything he knows about it.

Meanwhile, a bully named Tate has already started picking on him, calling him names in the hallway and shoving him around. Back home, Cody stops in front of the one photo left on the wall and asks who that is. Jesse tells him it was their son, Shawn, and that he's in heaven now. Cody says that's where his mom is, too.

When Jesse asks what his mother was like, he says he doesn't remember her. Then he looks back at the photo and says Shawn looks fun. That night, Jesse and Mark are lying on the couch when a blue butterfly lands on Mark's finger. Then Jesse looks across the room and freezes. Shawn is standing right there smiling at them exactly the way they remember him.

Jesse walks over slowly and touches his face. He's warm and he's real. She holds her son in her arms and Mark watches with tears in his eyes. Then upstairs, Cody wakes up and Shawn vanishes from Jesse's arms like smoke. She's left holding nothing. In the morning, Jesse and Mark are still shaking because they saw him and they touched him.

Cody walks in terrified and says it was his dream. He begs them not to be mad and promises it won't happen again. That's when Jesse understands that whatever Cody dreams comes to life while he sleeps. Jesse can't stop thinking about it. That evening, she sits Cody down in front of the TV and plays old home videos of Shawn opening Christmas presents, playing with his toy train, blowing kisses at the camera.

She wants Cody to see him so he'll dream about him. Cody watches every minute, his eyes getting heavier and heavier. Jesse notices he barely slept the night before. That's right. She tucks a blanket around him and tells him it's okay to relax in this house because he's home now. Then she tells him to get some sleep.

Mark goes to bed, but Jesse makes another pot of coffee so she can stay awake. Late that night, the Christmas lights in the living room glow on their own, and Shawn appears again. He acts out the same moments from the videos, playing with his train and laughing. Jesse sits on the floor and watches him with tears running down her face.

The next day, Jesse finds one of Cody's drawings. It's a tall, thin figure with no face. Cody tells her that's the canker man. Sometimes if he does a little ritual with his hands, it keeps him away. Jesse looks at the drawing a little too long, then puts it back on the table. Mark finds the home videos playing again and loses it.

He tells Jesse they promised to take care of Cody, not use him like some home movie projector, and it feels like abuse. Jesse insists Cody can help them heal. Mark says that thing in the living room is not their son. Jesse screams that she won't let anyone take Shawn away from her again.

Mark pulls the last photos of Shawn off the wall, and Jesse sinks down, crying. At school, Tate shoves Cody, and Cody stands up to him. Later, Cody is so exhausted he can barely keep his eyes open in math class, and he keeps getting easy sums wrong. At recess, the teacher lets him stay inside and rest.

She steps out for a minute and tells him to put his head down. Cody falls asleep at his desk. Tate sneaks back into the classroom to bother him. Then the lights flicker and a tall, dark figure rises up behind the bully. Annie sees it from the doorway and screams. When Cody wakes up, Tate is gone.

When Jesse picks him up, there are police cars and worried parents all over the school parking lot. A boy has gone missing. Cody won't look at anyone, and he just wants to go home. That night, he says he doesn't feel well and hardly says a word. Mark tells him the missing boy will turn up, but Cody stares at the floor.

Worried about what happened at school tonight? In the middle of the night, Cody wakes up screaming that he's awake over and over, clawing at the air. Jesse runs in and holds him tight while he thrashes in her arms. She keeps telling him it's okay until he finally stops shaking. Mark tries to cheer him up with a shopping trip for his new room, but Cody says he doesn't think he deserves it.

Jesse takes him to a doctor who says he hasn't slept for at least 2 days. The doctor warns that sleep loss at his age can do real damage and he writes a prescription for a children's sleeping pill. The next day, a police detective named Brown shows up at the door with another officer. They want to ask Cody about the boy who disappeared from school.

Cody tells him he saw the boy leave. When Mark gets home, Jesse tells him about the visit, and Mark has no idea what to think. After a fun day of shopping, Cody shows off his new race car bed and his freshly painted orange room. Mark even jokes that they're lucky they didn't go with pink.

At dinner, he quietly asks how Shawn died, and the table goes silent. Hi, buddy. Mark sends him to set the table so the grown-ups can talk. Later, Cody tells Mark it was his favorite day so far. Mark sits down with him and tells him the truth. Shawn drowned in an accident and afterward they found out they couldn't have more kids.

He promises Cody that nothing like that will ever happen to him. That night, Mark tells Jesse she's a great mom and Cody needs a great mom, so it's a perfect match. They don't need anything else. He asks her to come to bed. Jesse nods, but she can't let go of Shawn. When Mark goes up to bed, she crushes one of the sleeping pills into Cody's milk.

Later that night, Shawn appears in the house again, but this time his face starts to change. His skin turns gray and he grows into the canker man. Jesse races upstairs, but she can't wake Cody up because of the pill. The creature grabs Mark, who fights with everything he has and drags him into the darkness.

Get out of here. Then it slams Jesse against the wall and everything goes black. When Jesse wakes up, the house is full of police. Cody was the one who called for help. The detective asks why she drugged the child and where her husband was the day the boy vanished from school. Social services take Cody away while Jesse begs them not to.

Jesse goes to Natalie and begs to see Cody because she needs to understand his dreams. Natalie thinks Jesse is hiding domestic abuse and that her husband ran off after hurting the boy. She hands her a pile of support group pamphlets and says she never wants to see her again. So Jesse takes Cody's case file and tracks down his first foster father, a man named Wan, who now lives in a psychiatric hospital.

He's the man from the beginning of the movie. Jesse tells him she's seen what happens when Cody dreams. She watched it take her husband. Wheelan's face changes. Everyone has told him he's crazy for so long that he started to believe it and the staff will put him in slippers for good if they hear him.

He tells her the boy's dreams come true and it's amazing and beautiful, but so do his nightmares. Whatever that thing takes, it takes with it. He and his wife Katie fostered Cody after his mother died. They thought he was a sweet kid, maybe a little artist, and it started with butterflies all over the house, and for weeks, they thought it was magical.

Then Katie got the flu, and seeing her sick really upset Cody. One night, the canker man came for her. Wheel says he hated Cody for it, even though he knew it wasn't the boy's fault. Then he says what he really thinks. He couldn't do it, but someone has to stop Cody before he has another nightmare.

And if Welen had done it, Jesse's husband would still be alive. He asks her to finish what he couldn't. Jesse refuses because none of this is Cody's fault. Wheel calls after her and asks if she really wants to bet her life that an 8-year-old won't have another nightmare. Before she leaves, Jesse asks about Cody's real mother.

Wheel doesn't know anything except that she died. He assumes she went the same way his wife did. Jesse goes to the hospital where Cody's mother died. In the records office, she finds the file for Andrea Morgan, and a clerk tells her there might still be a box of her belongings in the basement.

Downstairs, after an hour of moving old cardboard around, she finds one marked with the right number. There's a pillow shaped like a butterfly in it and a journal. Meanwhile, at the children's home, Cody hasn't slept in two nights. The staff hold him down and give him a shot to make him sleep even as he cries that he doesn't want to hurt anyone.

Jesse calls the agency pretending to be Natalie and gets the name of the facility where they took him. Jesse gets there after midnight. Nobody's at the desk and nobody stops her. Butterflies are drifting down the hall, lighting it up a little. Then her foot catches on something. It's a black vine and there are more of them crawling up the walls.

Every bedroom she passes has a kid tangled up in them. Still asleep, Jesse follows the trail to Cody. He's asleep in the middle of it all, curled up and crying in his sleep. Then the canker man rises out of the darkness and comes straight at her. Jesse doesn't run. She holds up the butterfly pillow and the creature stops dead.

Up close, Jesse sees a sick, skinny woman in that face, not a monster. So, she does the last thing anyone would expect and hugs it. The thing goes soft in her arms, and when she looks down, it's Cody she's holding, and the vines are gone. At dawn, Jesse carries Cody down the stairs.

Before I Wake (2016) Ending Explained

The staff and Natalie stare at her, but nobody tries to stop her. She tells them she's taking him home. Back home, Jesse gives Cody his mother's journal. His mother's name was Andrea Morgan, and she loved him very, very much. When he was a baby, she noticed he was special. It was just the two of them against the world.

And she loved watching his gift grow. Then Jesse shows him his mother's hospital papers and points to one word, cancer. Cody's mother got very sick very fast and her body changed. When three-year-old Cody saw her one last time, he was too young to understand. All he remembered was a scary thin figure and a word he couldn't say right.

So he told everyone that Canker ate his mommy. The Canker man was never a monster. It was Cody's broken memory of his own dying mother. Jesse tells him she's sorry. She used him the way she tried to use Shawn, and she will never do that again. That night, Jesse lies down next to Cody and tells him a bedtime story.

It's about a special little boy who needed a mom and a sad mom who needed a son. In her story, the bully from school wakes up in his bed like nothing happened. And the woman who once cared for the boy comes back to her husband and they live happily ever after. Cody asks if those things can really happen.

Jesse says it depends on him because he has an amazing gift and who knows what it can do as it grows. Cody thanks her for bringing him home. Then Cody closes his eyes and as he dreams, a blue butterfly flutters into his open hand. Cody's monster was born from the most painful moment of his life and nobody had ever explained it to him.

It took a mother who was grieving her own child to see that he didn't need to be feared. He needed to be loved. Or was Wheeling right to be afraid?