While a lot of sci-fi and horror films tend to inject more obvious examples of social commentary into their stories, it’s always something of a question about how obvious you should make it. Some movies prefer not to let any overly obvious message override the plot, scares, or characters and instead are content to let the audience ferret out any meaning on their own. However, director Johnny Kevorkian seems dead set to make it incredibly obvious what his second movie, Await Further Instructions, is actually about as the titular green message splashed across the TV screen might as well scream “ALLEGORY”.
A tense and stripped back sci-fi thriller that feel decidedly like a lost episode of Black Mirror, Await Further Instructions has plenty of targets: rampant xenophobia, a lack of questioning of authority, the basic trauma of a family Christmas – but can this story of an Xmas-set lock-down manage to actually make us care about any of it as the social commentary fires in all directions.
It’s Christmas and Nick is heading home for the holidays to spend time with his estranged family and introduce them to his girlfriend, Annji. While Annji seems happy to make the effort, Nick is noticably apprehensive about the whole deal as his parents, Tony and Beth, his pregnant sister, Kate, and her meathead husband, Scott, aren’t the most accepting people if you take my drift. Worse yet, the sneering grandfather of the family has no issues speaking his bigoted mind out loud concerning Annji’s Indian heritage and even before a bizarre disaster strikes, the tension in the air is palpable.
Things get altogether worse when, after getting up early on Christmas morning to sneak off home, Nick and Annji discover that everyone has been sealed within the house by a strange, black, cable-like substance. Unable to break out, the family all have their wild theories about what might have occurred, but Tony soon takes charge when the only means of communication from the outside world is a message on their TV screen. In sickly green letters it annouces that there’s been some sort of incident and that everyone needs to stay inside and await further instructions. As Tony is the type of controlling patriarch who trusts the system implicitly due to his love for rules and order, he immediately insists that this has to be some sort of government safety protocol and every order must be followed to the letter no matter how suspect it may be.
However, while the majority of the family go along with it, Annji and Nick can’t help but question some of the more worrying demands, such as an order to inject themselves with syringes filled with a strange substance that gets dropped down the chimney.
Soon, the strangeness of the entire scenario mixes with pressure cooker tension of the family’s barely hidden resentments to create a potentially fatal environment, but as they vent a lifetime of resentment upon each other, there’s still the question of what’s actually is going on outside. Is it really a strange, government plan to quarantine everyone, or has something far more insidious taken place?
First off, it’s probably worth tipping the hat to the sheer amount of themes the filmmakers are targeting in their low budget, sci-fi chiller. In fact, name a current social ill and chances are Await Further Instructions has selected it in order to point a disapproving finger at it as everything from overly confident alpha masculinity to utter subservience to a system that won’t allow a single word said against it is broached. Some of it proves to be pretty timely (unbelievably this film was made before COVID occurred) and you can sense that Kevorkian is pumped to boot chunks out of everything from casual racism, Brexit, the clashing of generations and the worshiping of media over common sense; but we start experiencing a bit of a log jam when all of these threads start piling up.
Some of these issues manage to undercut themselves. The dark joke of a British family literally enslaved to the TV at Christmas time is especially witty, but unless the film is set in the 90s or something without me realising it, the threat of the will-sapping “idiot box” has long since been surpassed by the threat of social media. It’s here where Await Further Instructions, despite it’s lofty aspirations, inadvertently shows its belly, because it’s tough to care about the various jabs at modern thinking when virtually every character is actually impressively unlikable. Obviously, we’re not supposed to be bonding with David Bradley’s racist grampa, but some of the other performances are so iffy, it’s even tough to care entirely for the more heroic characters as they try to add some reasonable doubt to such orders as “Scrub Yourselves With Bleach”. While there’s also a few noticable points made about the character of Tony desperately trying to live up to his role as head of the family I have to say, I was curious to where the film was going and the final reveal takes the story from tense thriller fully into the realms of sci-fi body horror.
Again, despite that fact that the reveal is packed with ideas – you can’t claim that an invasion of mind enslaving, sentient cables that desire to be worshiped is an overused concept – like a lot of the other aspects of the film, it’s let down by budget issues and the sheer busy nature of the film. Some will no doubt see the addition of an alien influence as something of a cop-out, while others will get frustrated that the entire family resort to killing each other the very second the chips are down. However, the main issue is that even though the movie has an influx of ideas, the movie can’t quite help make the near instantaneous breakdown of an already shaky family unit seem a little far fetched. Maybe I’m being a little hard on Kevorkian and his aims, and maybe the real issue here is I’m a bit of an old, jaded sci-fi viewer and the second sickly green info started daring people to obey to ever more drastic orders, I refuse to believe someone would be dumb enough to immediately assume it was the government dropping tainted syringes down the chimney and using quarantine technology no one has ever heard of.
While Kevorkian and Co. should be commended for trying to pump their film full of pointed social commentary, some weak performances and some convenient lapses in logic means that a lot of the tangled cables of issues simply refuses to cling together.
An unsubtle dollop of social comentary, this science fiction mystery takes a last minute turn into apocalyptic body horror that delivers both some admittedly decent moments and lots of sickly green lighting. However, a lack of likable characters and some sledgehammer politics means that Await Further Instructions isn’t quite as smart as it insists it is.
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