Choose or Die – Film Review

A broke student who plays an obscure 1980s survival computer game in pursuit of an unclaimed $100,000 prize. After a series of unexpectedly terrifying moments, she soon realises she’s no longer playing for the money, but for her own life.

There’s something so oddly fascinating about movies that are centered around some sort of ordinary technology suddenly turned deadly. One of my most anticipated movies of 2019 was Countdown, which turned out to be a complete dumpster fire which was a shame because the premise of a phone app that told you when you died was quite interesting. There have been other movies with similar premises and yet almost none of them are good.

This is why I was seriously hoping that Toby Meakins‘ Choose or Die would finally be the one to impress me – it wasn’t. Although it isn’t nearly as bad as Countdown, this film is still a muddled, lazy, and shockingly boring horror with a plot that honestly goes nowhere. By the time the end credits roll on screen, you’ll probably feel just as confused about the whole thing as you did when it started.

Simon Allen‘s script doesn’t do anything new for the genre and feels like it’s trying to pay homage to 80s horror films, without bringing anything new to the table. There’s also far too much exposition here and too many scenes of characters droning on about nonsense and not enough actual character development. And for a horror movie about a deadly video game, we see a staggering low kill count here.

I’m not saying this movie needed a dozen kills to be fun or exciting, but when your whole film is about this deadly game, you’d expect there to be at least a good chunk of kills throughout, but that’s simply not the case. And even the kills that are in the movie are quite lame and unimaginative, except for maybe two.

Asa Butterfield is easily the best part of the whole movie. I’ve been a massive fan of his ever since watching him on the Netflix series Sex Education, and once again, he is charming and extremely charismatic in the role of Isaac. His co-star Iola Evans is also quite great in her role, as well. As mentioned earlier, though, the character development here is practically non-existent which was a shame because these two could have gotten some truly great, fleshed-out characters that were deserving of their acting talents.

But sadly, these two great lead performances can’t save Choose or Die from being an unbelievably bland and uninspired horror film. With an extremely muddled script and a story that goes absolutely nowhere, you’d be forgiven for choosing not to watch this mess.