On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) review: poetically immersive

Interesting drama, as this 38 minute immersive documentary reminds us, isn’t necessarily about what will or did happen; it can also be about what might have happened. The event—or non-event—around which On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) orbits concerns a government-delivered emergency text message sent to 1.4 million people in Hawaii on June 13, 2018 that read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” 

It may not have been a drill—but there was no inbound missile. The creators of this experience (Mike Brett, Steve Jamison, Arnaud Colinart and Pierre Zandrowicz) aren’t able to answer the obvious question of what wrong; why that false alarm was sent in the first place. In one scene they display television interview footage of the man—his identity obscured—responsible for sending the message, describing it as “a system failure” and insisting “I’m really not to blame.” But On the Morning You Wake isn’t about assigning guilt or assessing failure: it explores what went through the minds of people who had the fear of God put in them, and presents activistic commentary on the need for nuclear disarmament.

It’s essentially an oral history project, weaving together many voices and drawing a tone of heavy-hearted contemplation. We’re placed inside emotionally and geographically significant spaces, early on finding ourselves in the home of a resident who reminisces about how she “looked down at it (her phone) and froze,” because she “could not believe what I was looking at.” As she speaks the walls around us break into shard-like pieces that trigger a transition into a totally black tableau, leading into an immersion featuring a man reflecting on how “you initially can’t even process it.” 

There’s lots of comments along similar lines, interviewees expressing the kind of thoughts one would expect given the circumstances—lots of shock horror and existential rumination. A long spoken poem steeped in Indigenous Hawaiian legend—performed by its author, Dr Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio—opens the experience and sets a meditative tone. She begins: “On the morning you wake to the end of the world, take your body back to the kai. To the place our kupuna taught us life began: first pō, then coral, then slime, then a whole universe…”

The experience matches ruminative perspectives with surreal aesthetics. During that opening monologue, which encourages the listener to “dive yourself back into the depth of creation,” we see a space-like environment that slowly fills out with details drawn from dot-like circles of light, forming vision of a landscape of rivers cutting through mountains. Subsequent immersions also embrace a dream-like texture, creating a stylishly hollowed out look reminiscent of 2016’s Notes on Blindness, which uses audio recordings from a writer and professor, John Hull, to reflect on the process of going blind. 

When On the Morning You Wake really embraces the conjuring of surreal immersive environments, existing in that hollowed-out half reality, it feels quite close to a work that needed to be made in VR. When it attempts to present settings (such as homes and Hawaiian beaches) in lifelike ways, the visuals look embarrassingly rudimentary, comparable to graphics from the first PlayStation. Part of this comes down to hardware limitations, though there’s also the question of why the developers would bother with such renderings in the first place, given they look so unrealistic. 

When it gets dreamy and trippy, however, the experience does a good job marrying ruminative content with ruminative form, creating a sense of immersion that feels poetic and emotive.