Choose or Die is a new Netflix horror film, starring Iola Evans, Asa Butterfield Robert Englund and Eddie Marsan, with a feature directorial debut for Toby Meakins. The plot concerns a broke college dropout, who finds and plays an obscure 80’s computer game in hope of claiming the unclaimed prize money, but the game curses her and she is faced with a series of terrifying challenges.
Not that I was shocked given Netflix’s overall track record with original horror films, but this film was an utter mess. While conceptually it sounds interesting, the execution is tedious and nonsensical, and it runs out of steam alarmingly quick. It feels a bit like an extended Black Mirror episode, but without any of the intelligent writing of characters and stories that Black Mirror has. The game and its curse make absolutely no sense as to how it interacts and affects the real world, which would have been forgivable if the wackiness had a consistency, but it tries to be so grounded that the lore of this game becomes a big turn off, with the plot just trundling from one set piece to the next, seemingly completely unconcerned with any story in between.
The acting is not particularly poor, certainly passable, but the writing of the characters is so paper thin that it can’t stay afloat. We know so little about them, thus meaning we don’t care much about them to begin with, but the script makes makes them take some very strange choices as it progresses, which sours you more, as often can be the case in these quirky concept horror films. Completely dumb decisions that nobody else would ever make render this more and more frustrating as it goes along. Horrific things will happen to the protagonist or their loved ones, and then a scene later they’ll be going about their day unaffected.
Finally, I’m not sure why it is how it is but the soundtrack didn’t work at all for me, very jarring. High tempo rap songs thrown in almost completely at random, as if the director is trying to cover up the fact he can’t make a scene tense or gripping, and making the tone more uneven than the storyline itself had managed.
So overall, this is a nonsensical plot headed by paper thin characters, intertwined with lazy human drama subplots that we’ve seen time and time again, with an incompatible soundtrack. Instead of Choose or Die, just choose not to watch this film.
CinemaStance 