YMMV Tropes for "Await Further Instructions"
- Anvilicious: Blind Obedience is bad. It's bad to be unable to admit fault. Racism and othering are bad. Subtle this film is not.
- Critical Dissonance: Despite the impressive 80% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 28% audience score.
- Hate Sink: Several examples:
- Tony, the family's patriarch, is incapable of ever admitting fault (at least until he becomes convinced that the alien parasite living in the television/surrounding the house is actually a god, and he only admits that he did not realize everything that happened to the family was divine), is rude, obviously resents and openly distrusts his son, has no awareness that his blind obedience to the television/ alien parasite is endangering his family, treats his wife very poorly, is manipulative, and abandons his family in a time of great need so that he can go to his office and come up with "a different approach" to their predicament. He also dismisses the deaths of his own daughter and father (granted, the latter is an asshole) as part of the cost of safety, as he sees it. Whatever few redeeming qualities the movie attempts to attribute to him is overshadowed by his numerous character flaws, and it seems as if his character was made to hate.
- The grandfather is a racist, elitist, [likely] misogynistic, emotionally/physically abusive, abrasive, hateful, and overall despicable asshole who is very easy to hate. He seems to enjoy when the members of his family fight and become visibly offended, and makes no effort to conceal his open contempt for everyone- and everything- around him. No one mourned when he died.
- Nick's sister, Kate, does not take much time after she is introduced to show that she's a xenophobic Know-Nothing Know-It-All, as she thinks Muslim doctors are sneaking into the country and berates Annji for using a "made-up" word (before swapping to "Indian" when told it's a real word) when Annji plays "Tumult" in Scrabble.
- Moral Event Horizon: Tony's willingness to follow the television's instructions are largely reasonable, given the outlandishness of the situation. But giving his own son the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique was so hard a line that even the typically-meek Scott turns on him.
- Paranoia Fuel: Waking up from a sound sleep to find that your house has been utterly locked down by an outside source while every channel on TV reads "STAY INDOORS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS" is rather bad already. Later events - such as saying the food has been contaminated, that someone has been infected, and that one of them is actually a sleeper agent takes this up to eleven.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Scott at least improves when it's time to save Annji, realizing things have gone too far, and has a crisis of conscience when Tony is about to take Nick's eye.
- The Scrappy: Everyone other than Nick, Annji, and Nick's mother, Beth, are not only jerks, but racist towards Annji to boot. The father and grandfather both being abusive and everyone but Annji and Nick slavishly listening to the TV at first, including inoculating themselves with an unknown substance and scrubbing their bare skin with bleach.
- Special Effects Failure: The grandfather seizing before vomiting is clearly the same second of footage running back and forth.
- The Woobie: Beth, the mother. She was ecstatic at Nick returning home, is clearly hurt when Nick and Annji make plans to leave, and her attempt to emulate Nick and Annji's flirtatious behavior with her husband is flatly rebuffed, as Tony is appalled at her making light of the situation.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The movie is stated by many to have a really good premise and a promising first half but was unfortunately wasted on moments that killed dramatic tension at the later bits, the movie going from psychological thriller to slasher, and a confusing ending that leaves more questions than answers.
