Film Review: Choose or Die

Director: Toby Meakins
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Iola Evans, Eddie Marsan
Running time: 84 mins

With the emergence of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018, Alice in Borderland in 2020, and Squid Game in 2021, the demand for game-centred horrors has undoubtedly skyrocketed amongst the ever-hungry Netflix audience. Pop in a social commentary about the class hierarchy and add a cheeky pot of prize money into the mix, and you have a winning formula. With this and the addition of the ever-worshipped eighties teen aesthetic (think Stranger Things, Sex Education, The End of the F***ing World), Choose or Die is an extremely promising hybrid of Netflix’s most beloved movies and shows. I carried this high expectation with me as I started to watch this film... and had abandoned it completely by the forty minute mark.  

It starts out strong: a fun, retro-grunge gamer aesthetic, a script and soundtrack laden with eighties pop culture references, characters that are just aching for you to tell them how cool and different they are. We open up on a chilling introductory scene, in which an Americanised Eddie Marsan (playing ‘Hal’) begins to fire up a retro computer game, CURS>R, with his wife and son brawling noisily in the background. After quickly discovering that the game seems to be watching and understanding his every move, he starts to make basic in-game decisions which impact the reality around him (which Hal takes remarkably well, all things considered - I would have fled the room screaming, personally). Ultimately, he lands on a slightly more ominous choice - his tongue or her ear? Hal pauses. The game continues. His tongue or her ear? Hal pushes away from his desk. The game persists. Choose or die, Hal. Choose or die. After failing to make a decision in time, Hal stumbles out to the kitchen, where he finds a horror far worse than he could have imagined.

Three months later, we follow the journey of CURS>R to the bedroom of Isaac (Netflix star Asa Butterfield, playing (you guessed it) an awkward twenty-something, yearning for a shot at love). Here, our protagonist, Kayla (played by promising newcomer Iola Evans) discovers the game amongst Isaac’s belongings and soon becomes enticed by the potentially unclaimed $125,000 prize money. Desperate for cash and yearning for a new shot at life, Kayla takes the game with her and decides to start it up. And so, the real story begins.  

It’s a well-shot film, undeniably, and the gore sequences are applaudingly realistic, with innovative ideas which are well-realised by director, Toby Meakins. The plot, however, falls short of praise. Pieced together by a dull script and held up by largely uninteresting, predictable characters, Choose or Die is, unfortunately, a tolerable watch at best.

Kayla, our most fleshed-out character by far, is a struggling cleaner and coder, supporting her mentally-ill mother through drug addiction, after the loss of her young son. We watch on, nervously, as a life of poverty and deprivation gnaws away at her health and sanity, ultimately driving her to take up the game and gamble with death. This character arc, simplistic but profound in its message, is let down by its hollow resolution, which feels truly underwhelming. 

The remainder of the characters go unexplored, despite the cast being relatively small. Their motives and actions are predictable. Their relationships are bland and unconvincing. Their deaths are unemotional - perhaps scary, at best. What results is a compilation of unsettlingly gory, Saw-like choice scenes, involving characters that we don’t have all that much interest in, strung together by a vague commentary on poverty and loss.  

Choose or Die quickly descends from a quirky cursed-tech-horror, into derivative, sequel-hungry Netflix filler, begging for a cult following that I (unfortunately) don’t think they will get. While it will undoubtedly amass its own fan club (and they’d be right in arguing for its unoriginal, but nevertheless cool, gamer-grunge look and lore-building), this seems to be generating the same review from reviewers and couch critics alike: ‘Uh, yeah, it was okay, I guess.’ 

Did you know? Isaac's laptop has several stickers with Cult of the Dead Cow's logo. Cult of the Dead Cow is a legendary hacker group.

Choose or Die is now available on Netflix