‘Wake Up’ Review: An Eco-Protest in an Ikea-Style Showroom Gives New Meaning to ‘Direct Action’

In “Wake Up,” six young activists are determined to make a point. Instead, they wind up on the receiving end of one: stabbed, speared or otherwise impaled by the psychotic security guard at the Ikea-esque House Idea store they’ve targeted for an ecoterrorism stunt.

Conceived and executed by what remains of RKSS — the Canadian filmmaking collective behind “Turbo Kid” and “Summer of 84” — the wicked English-language thriller is much bloodier (and a lot less pretentious) than Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama,” the 2016 art film in which a crew of militant Parisian hipsters hid out in a posh department store after planting bombs around town. There, the young anarchists spent the night ransacking the newly renovated Printemps HQ, whereas in this case, the half-dozen kids strike back at a company that pillages the rainforests to bring you unpronounceable, impossible-to-assemble Kallax shelves and Järvfjället chairs.

Named for its ELF-like gang of young radicals, “Wake Up” isn’t really a political statement against Ikea — although it does satisfy the widely held fantasy of imagining what one might do if given the run of such a showroom after dark. Wearing brightly colored animal masks, Yasmin (Jacqueline Moré) and Grace (Alessia Yoko Fontana) tag the walls with spray paint, while Ethan (Benny O. Arthur) and new recruit Karim (Thomas Gould) hit the bathroom department, smearing the shower, mirror and commode with pig’s blood. (Fun fact: Apparently, Ikea stores removed the display toilets after unattended kids mistook them for the real thing.)

After doing their worst, the well-intentioned but clearly under-prepared dilettantes gather in the cafeteria, pegging one another with Swedish meatballs … which quickly escalates into an epic paintball fight. It all seems like a fun prank for most of the first act, during which the directors simultaneously introduce the two security guards, alcoholic Jack (Aidan O’Hare) and his clearly unhinged colleague, Kevin (Turlough Convery), a “primitive hunting” enthusiast who rigs gnarly rat traps that clobber the unsuspecting vermin full of nails when triggered. Foreboding, ya think? He’s a rather extreme fellow to have monitoring a family-friendly store after dark, as the last gag of this unapologetically twisted movie bears out.

Kevin is fiddling with a homemade crossbow in the store’s control room when he spots one of the kids on a surveillance monitor. Jack’s already sloshed by this point and begs his colleague not to call their supervisor, preferring to deal with the troublemakers themselves. Bad idea, since Kevin immediately takes things too far, smashing bunny-masked Emily (Charlotte Stoiber) against the wall until her lifeless corpse collapses to the floor. “Blood for blood!” the Wake Up group had screamed into the camera before raiding the store, but this wasn’t exactly what they had in mind.

For the remainder of the film, it’s the ill-equipped (and slightly bratty) ecoterrorists against a far more terrifying adversary: Kevin, who bellows, “We are all animals, and this is my hunting ground!” as he takes the totally inappropriate opportunity to bring his hunting skills into the workplace. It only takes one murder for the other Wake Uppers to get the picture, shifting from save-the-world offense to save-themselves defense. Not that the filmmakers are nearly so interested in sparing these spoiled Gen Z posers, who use their convictions as a pretext to make trouble.

If there’s any kind of political message to be found in “Wake Up,” it’s a rather cynical — if not downright sadistic — dig at the “woke” movement, offering those impatient with what can sometimes seem like performative acts of protest from the younger generation a grisly comeuppance (something that might have been more fun before the U.S. administration brought the hammer down on anything resembling dissent). RKSS aren’t so hard on their college-aged characters that audiences don’t wince when Kevin kills them, though they’re also treated as subjects of ridicule, acting like superficial “influencers” and squabbling among themselves.

At 80 minutes, the results are tense, tight and stylish, with a few playfully absurd challenges thrown in for Ikea haters, as when Kevin takes one of them hostage, then orders the others to clean up their mess before his captive bleeds to death. That means running to the warehouse, picking out the boxes and rushing to assemble a wardrobe in record time — something sure to induce anxiety in anyone who’s struggled with the Swedish company’s flat-packed “ready-to-assemble” system. The film’s biggest laugh comes when one carelessly tears open a bag, sending the wooden pegs bouncing in every direction.

Where “Wake Up” stumbles is in giving the endangered intruders any way to fight back. As played by Convery, Kevin is a hulking, emotionally stunted lunatic, who lives with his mom, but is big and strong enough to rip the activists apart with his bare hands. And yet, they outnumber him; it would have been fun to see them gang up and pounce on him like mountain lions taking down a wild bear. There are rumors of a rift among co-directors Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell and François Simard, who are all credited as RKSS — although like the movie, we’ll soon see which (if any) of them survive to carry on the cause.