Mark Reviews Movies: CHOOSE OR DIE

Choose or Die, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 15, 2022

The stuck-in-the-past gimmick of Choose or Die is fairly neat. Screenwriter Simon Allen definitely puts more thought into it than the story's stuck-in-the-past drama.

That gimmick involves a video game, and it's specifically one styled like those text adventures from the 1980s. Those of a certain generation will recall the sort or its more graphics-focused progeny. For those who don't, the games involved a lot of exploring, finding objects, making choices, and solving puzzles, by way of typing actions and reading blocks of text describing the various spaces of an in-game world. Death in such games could come easily with a mistaken turn or bad decision, so having such a game become part of and influence the real world is well-suited for a horror story.

That's the premise here, as a product of the '80s, now a depressed and disillusioned man losing himself in the nostalgic artifacts of his youth, unleashes an old-school video game upon the world. Like with so many activities and behaviors of a mid-life crisis, this game, as it turns out, is quite destructive, because it's literally cursed.

A gimmick as clever as this one deserves some credit, and Allen and director Toby Meakins have some dark and unsettling fun with the way the game mirrors and impacts the real world. The game seems capable of predicting what people will say and do, with text of the words and actions appearing on the screen before someone even has a chance to say or do them. Things in a place change, based on the scenario of a certain in-game space. What a player types into the on-screen prompt comes to often-bloody life in the realm of the tangible.

There's a lot of promise here. It's ultimately undercut by a few too many of the usual trends and generic tricks of horror storytelling: unconvincing characters, mixed results when it comes to executing the central gimmick, and a need to dissect and explain away the sense of mystery.

The prologue, as per usual, establishes the basics of the threat and the rules. We meet Hal (Eddie Marsan), the middle-aged man living in nostalgic denial, who has found the dangerous game while shopping for relics of his youth. Upon booting up the game, it offers him a series of choices—having another drink or not and turning off or leaving on the lights, for example—that manifest themselves in reality. His final choice for the first level is to pick between his son's tongue or his wife's ears, and the game forces that choice with piercing, electronic shriek that promises to kill Hal.

Later, with copies of the game sent out into the wild, one copy falls into the hands of Kayla (Iola Evans), who works as a cleaner in order to pay the bills for herself and her depressed mother (played by Angela Griffin), who's still grieving the death of her younger son. The game also offers a cash reward to anyone who can complete it, so with the help of her '80s-loving and game designer friend Isaac (Asa Butterfield), she loads the deadly piece of interactive media on her laptop.

The early sequences of the game bleeding into the world—one featuring a server who becomes almost possessed to clean up broken glass in a horrible way and another that has Kayla trying to protect her mother from a giant rat, only to discover she's controlling the creature that's hunting her mom—are fairly cunning. The later ones either try to do too much with too little, such as having Kayla confront her guilt over the death of her brother in a foggy swimming pool, or forget any kind of logic just for an aesthetic, such as someone turning into a VHS-like image of himself while vomiting magnetic tape.

All the while, Allen tries to balance Kayla's tragic back story and home life with the horror, her relationship with Isaac, and a search to discover the truth of the game's origin. The last part, at least, is irrelevant to understanding how the game functions, but it certainly gives Allen an open window to craft a sequel. Like so much of this story that isn't about the game and its mischievous ways, the various elements here start to feel more formulaic than an idea as solid this one deserves. Some of the early sense of demented fun and the unexpected do return for the climax. In it, one player has to face off against another, now serving as the game's "final boss," and the rules of the battle involve a switcheroo in terms of who takes damage in said fight.

The potential of its nifty gimmick is the only thing that really matters here, so everything else ends up feeling like a distraction. Strangely, Choose or Die tries to accomplish too many things and, in the end, shortchanges them all.

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