Drug Trial Goes Horribly Wrong as Participants Die If They Fall Asleep

The Critic's Cut
1 follower
Nov 6, 2026
A group of young people desperate for money sign up for a clinical trial, only to become victims of a terrible side-effect: if they fall asleep, they will die.
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedClaire and a group of volunteers are trapped in a lethal lockdown at Blackwood Pharmaceuticals after an experimental drug causes severe brain inflammation. To survive, they must fight extreme insomnia and terrifying hallucinations, as falling asleep results in immediate death. After a series of violent betrayals and deaths, Claire is the sole survivor to escape the facility.
Secretly in the labs of Blackwood Pharmaceuticals,
a mouse is retrieved from its cage to be
decapitated.
Meanwhile Claire arrives at the company's
very modern facilities to participate in some
clinical trials for five days because she needs the money.
Once everyone has changed into scrubs,
they're called to the exam room, where they discover
they have no Wi-Fi or reception.
Claire is trying to tell her worried mom
not to contact her anymore, but the message doesn't
go through.
It seems the two of them were in some sort of fight.
Then the group meets Dr. Burke, who will supervise the trial.
The medicine dosage will start low and go up each day,
and during those five days participants
won't be allowed to leave that floor.
During the rest of the day, a nurse keeps checking
on their health, repeating
the same questions about any possible pain, checking their pulse,
taking blood samples, and even following them
into the bathroom to take samples there too.
When Allison tries to befriend Claire,
she snaps and yells at her, only to interrupt herself when
she suddenly needs to throw up.
After puking in the bathroom, Claire bumps into Amir and
learns he's a med student, who hopes to get
an internship with the company in the future.
That night, Claire's brain keeps having a strange chemical reaction,
and she can't sleep. When she leaves her room,
she discovers all the others can't sleep either,
which worries them. Marcus says he's
feeling something he can't describe.
The next morning, Burke tells them that a bit
of insomnia isn't a big deal and the process
of dozens of tests starts again.
On the wall, a clock counts down the hours left for the trial
to end. Later in her office,
Burke calls her superiors to inform them that whatever it is that
she's testing is going directly
into the participant's central nervous system and
and causing serious brain inflammation.
The higher-ups remind her this is a double-blind trial,
meaning she isn't allowed to have any more information.
However they're shocked to hear
that the test results Burke sent them happened in just one day,
which is too fast. The next day,
Burke informs the group that the parameters of
the trial have changed and now the company wants
to know how long the group can stay awake.
They are forbidden from trying to sleep
and if they feel too tired they must inform Burke or a
nurse. After Claire takes the new dose,
she's put in an MRI machine, which makes her very
anxious because she's claustrophobic.
The darkness and the weird noises bring
back horrible memories of her drunk mom telling
her off and refusing to let her out.
Terrified, Claire begs for the test to stop,
but it keeps going until the end.
Time continues to pass and the group gets more
and more concerned about the lack of sleep,
not to mention how high the medicine dose is getting.
Burke reminds them they're free to
leave at any point but also announces that every person
who stays until the end will get a bonus
of 30,000 euros. Most of the group loves the idea
and starts cheering, but Claire and Amir
are still wary, believing there's always a catch.
The group starts playing music and
drinking champagne to celebrate,
and Alison convinces Claire to dance with her. However
Claire starts to yawn multiple times in a row,
so she leaves to inform Burke.
Then Ray yawns as well, so Burke interrupts the celebrations
and sends everyone to drink water.
Afterward Burke calls her superiors again,
explaining the participants' immune systems
have gone haywire. She wants to end the trial early,
but the higher-ups refuse and order her
to keep upping the dose. Meanwhile the participants
are keeping each other awake by chatting,
however Claire starts to doze off.
Allison immediately snaps her out of it and asks
her about her plans for the money,
but Claire is very dismissive and hurts her feelings,
so Allison leaves the room. Since the moment was ruined,
Amir leaves as well and as he takes the corridor,
he overhears Burke tell her bosses she refuses
to take responsibility for whatever happens next.
After she leaves her office,
Amir sneaks inside and looks at the test results on her computer,
discovering the brain inflammation.
Horrified, he copies all the files in a flash drive.
Back to the group, they're watching TV
when the screen suddenly starts failing.
Claire notices Allison sitting on her own
and approaches her to apologize, only to discover
she's fallen asleep.
At that moment Allison starts bleeding from her eyes, nose, and ears.
Then she has a seizure.
Her body falls to the floor
and her eyes become bloodshot as she pukes, and after lots of
shaking, she dies.
When Burke sees this, the facility's computer announces
that there has been a security breach
and from now on they'll be under lockdown protocol.
An alarm starts ringing through every room
and the lights turn red as the computer starts
the countdown, so Burke and the participants immediately run away.
The door is already closing,
but Burke tries to cross anyway, causing her to get stuck
and severely hurt by the heavy metal.
The group drags her out, but it's too late,
Burke apologizes and dies while the door closes,
leaving the participants stuck inside.
The clock on the wall resets and now counts 24 hours before
the lockdown ends. Amir comes out of Burke's office
and tells everyone to stay awake because
if they fall asleep, they'll die.
He explains he saw the tests and that for the last four days,
their brains have been pushed into overdrive,
so now they're shutting down. Everyone panics
and Ray even gets a bit aggressive
while the others try to push the door to no avail.
In the rec room, the television plays a message
from the company asking them to be patient.
Next they look around and find a bunch
of smelling salts, so each of them gets five
packets that should last all night.
Amir warns them to use them at the last second,
but Ray immediately uses one anyway.
Then Ray finds some medicine in a cabinet,
but Amir immediately warns them against it.
In fact, he advises not to drink coffee either.
Any kind of stimulant will just make
the metaphoric flames in their brains burn faster.
Amir is sure this is treatable,
so they need to wait for the doors to open and find help.
For the next few hours, the group tries their best
to stay awake. By now they've been awake
for 100 hours. Amir thinks
that the brain inflammation will go down now that they don't
take the medicine anymore,
but when he scans Claire's brain for a checkup, the results terrify
him. However he doesn't tell the others.
As Claire walks down the corridor, she feels incredibly dizzy
and begins hearing her mother's voice.
She decides to record a message for her mother,
who is under palliative care in the hospital
because her liver was ruined by all the drinking.
However, Claire ends up deleting the video.
Afterward she finds the mice in the lab and decides to free them,
but they refuse to go away.
With 16 hours to go, the group starts having trouble staying awake.
Ray slaps his cheek to get
rid of the drowsiness because he's already used all his salts
and soon he starts bothering the
others, asking them to share theirs but nobody wants to help him.
Meanwhile Amir continues to
run tests in the exam room with the two bodies,
and suddenly Burke sits up behind him.
However when Amir turns around, she's still down and dead,
which means he's starting to experience hallucinations.
In the rec room, Claire stares at the wall
while she continues to hear her mother's voice.
Darkness takes over her vision
as she remembers her creepy childhood room,
but before she gives in, Marcus snaps her out of it.
Claire can't understand how Marcus is doing so well,
so he shows her a scar on his leg that he
got during a serious hiking accident,
saying the body will always push through when it needs to
survive. Afterward Claire goes to Burke's office
and looks at the brain scans before checking her
patient file. She discovers notes that talk about
the destructive behavior and despair in her life,
which made her a perfect candidate
for high-risk trials. Later Claire finds
Vanessa using fire to stay awake,
saying she refuses to give up. In the bathroom,
Marcus is whistling and hears someone whistle back
although he's supposed to be alone.
Then he turns on the tap, only to discover
the water doesn't make noise when it falls.
It isn't until he turns it off that he finally hears the delayed noise.
When he knocks on the mirror, the same happens.
The sound arrives a few seconds later.
Scared, Marcus leaves the bathroom
and hears the whistling in the corridors.
He starts wandering around yet doesn't see a single person,
and when he makes it to the front hall,
he's shocked to see the door opening.
Marcus goes through the door and into a deep darkness,
and a moment later the others find
him dead on the floor because the hallucination made him fall asleep.
There are still 15 hours to go, so everyone worries.
Claire feels dizzy and has a vision of Allison waking up,
so she walks away from the group
rather clumsily.
She makes it to the kitchen and after seeing
a mouse staring at her, she uses fire to reanimate
her body.
The resulting burn scar is awful, but Claire feels awake and alert now.
After bandaging her hand,
she finds the others and yells at them,
announcing she's tired of waiting and that she'll find a way
out. The group makes a map of the facility
to learn what wall they need to break to get out.
Amir tells them it won't work because facilities like
this one are built with tight security,
but the others ignore him
and start hitting the wall with an axe. By taking turns,
they manage to work quite fast
and eventually the hole is big enough to find the end.
Unfortunately Amir was right,
the wall is protected by metal as thick as the door.
While Claire goes looking for Amir to ask for more ideas,
Ray starts to wonder how Amir knew
about the metal wall and concludes he must
be secretly working for the company. When Claire
finds Amir, he gives her a letter with a confession
while hallucinating Burke's dead face.
It turns out it was his copying the files
that triggered the lockdown, and now he feels so
guilty that he decides to fall asleep.
Claire immediately stops him and keeps throwing fire
metaphors to understand what they can do with their brains.
This gives Amir an idea, using
certain medicines as poison,
he can create an effect that usually would cause brain death.
But with these side effects they're having
it should stop their death instead.
Ignoring the hallucinations,
Amir immediately starts to work on the mix.
Claire rushes to tell the others and bumps into Paul,
who tells her not to trust Amir.
He reveals he searched Amir's things
and found the bottle of stimulants he told them not to take,
which is now empty. At that moment the power goes out,
so they use their phone flashlights to move around.
Claire starts hearing her mom's and Allison's voices
and starts having a breakdown before
turning around to find a dead Allison
standing in front of her. Screaming,
Claire drops her phone and the light goes off
so she tries using a lighter instead,
causing her to see more dead faces in the dark.
When she finally gets a flame going,
the hallucinations stop and she finally finds the electricity box,
allowing her to bring power back.
Then she finds Paul on the ground and wakes him up before he could die.
Afterward the group confronts Amir,
asking him about the stimulants and the power box.
He swears he poured them out for safety
and that he didn't mess with the power,
but Ray punches him for it and ties him up with Paul's help.
Vanessa, Ray, and Paul are sure he's
hiding something and ignore Claire's concerns
as they decide they have to make Amir confess
through any means. Ray gets ready to hurt Amir
with a knife to make him talk, so Claire stops
him by confessing Amir has been working on a cure.
When Ray says that Amir's plan is to kill them,
Claire volunteers to be the first subject to test it,
that way they'll know if it's safe or not.
The group still refuses to release Amir though,
so he gives them instructions on how to mix the medicine
While Paul works, Vanessa talks to Ray in private,
confessing she saw him trip the fuse.
Ray admits he was trying to make Amir
fall asleep to prove he was faking it,
so Vanessa shares one more secret, she's found a sedative they can use.
At that moment, Paul finishes mixing the cure
and gets the injection ready.
While everyone is distracted,
Vanessa approaches Amir to give him the sedative,
however she suddenly falls to the floor. In an out-of-body experience,
Vanessa watches the others rush to her body,
but soon smoke and darkness surround her.
She sees the devil appear before her and screams
as her real body starts bleeding and having a seizure.
Paul rushes to grab the cure,
but Vanessa's shaking knocks the needle away and breaks it,
then she pukes and finally dies.
To make matters worse, Paul's fast movement knocks
the jar with the rest of the cure off the table,
causing it to break as well.
Amir starts laughing like a maniac,
causing Claire to snap and threaten him with a knife.
When she realizes she's losing it,
she leaves the room to check on the clock,
but her blurry vision makes her see good night instead
of numbers. Then she starts
staring at the wall as she hears her mom's voice again
and darkness takes over her mind.
A dizzy Claire takes out her phone
and records a message for her mother before finding her last
salt packet, but she falls to the floor and drops it.
Suddenly her body floats up as heavenly music
starts playing, however Claire fights against
the hallucination and swims in the air to reach
the packet, finally taking the salts to wake up.
Then she hears a noise and taps on the
wrecked room wall to discover it's hollow.
With Paul's help, she breaks down the wallpaper and
finds a hidden autopsy room.
There's a door at the back that takes her to a corridor and
Meaning they can finally get out.
Claire wants to tell the others, but Paul says they should leave alone.
Meanwhile Amir keeps seeing Burke,
who insists he should stand up for himself and points out
that Claire left the knife nearby.
In the bedroom, Ray says goodbye to Vanessa's body,
only to find Amir's letter in her pocket.
Furious, Ray goes to find Amir,
who immediately starts screaming for help.
Claire hears him and runs back,
so Paul has no choice but to go with her.
In the lab, Ray grabs a scalpel and gets ready to get
revenge on Amir, who struggles against the fabric
on his wrist and manages to break them.
He jumps on Ray and stabs him with the scalpel,
but then the sickness finally makes him lose it
and he grabs the knife to stab Ray multiple
times until he's dead. At that moment Claire
and Paul arrive and try to calm him down,
but Burke's hallucination pushes Amir into
finishing the job. The duo immediately runs away,
and Paul hides in the rec room,
locking the door behind him.
Now Claire has to keep running into the MRI room,
Where Amir catches up and throws her around,
accidentally turning on the machine.
When Amir is about to stab Claire,
the magnets in the MRI machine take the knife away from
his hand, so Claire kicks Amir and runs away.
Meanwhile Paul makes it to the elevator and activates it,
but unfortunately this isn't
an elevator, it's an incinerator.
Soon huge flames come out of the walls and burn Paul to death.
Back to Claire, she finds some scissors
and gets ready to defend herself while Amir retrieves
his knife and goes after her.
Both of them are about to fall asleep
when suddenly the clock hits zero and the computer
announces lockdown is over.
Lights return and the door opens to let in a few armed men
who immediately killed Amir.
Claire hears the gunshot and rushes to hide
while the men search the floor to get all
the bodies out.
Once the coast is clear,
Claire tries to escape and finds the bodies in bags,
so she quickly covers her face with
Amir's blood and gets inside a bag to pretend to be dead.
A man checks on her and believes his co-worker found
the body, so she's thrown in the back
of a truck with the others.
Claire uses her phone's flashlight
and keeps hallucinating that a dead Allison is in the
bag with her, so she closes her eyes and hums her mother's song.
When she opens her eyes again,
a more friendly Allison smiles at her before disappearing.
Once the truck is far enough from the facility,
Claire comes out of the bag, and seeing her in the mirror gives
the driver such a shock that it causes the vehicle to crash.
Claire sees both men are down and immediately leaves the truck,
only managing a few steps before falling unconscious.
Four months later, Claire is still in a coma in the hospital.
A newscast announces that Blackwood Pharmaceuticals was cleared
of any crimes and the incident was blamed on Burke.
At that moment, Claire opens her eyes.
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