Director – Toby Meakins, Screenplay – Simon Allen, Producers – Sebastien Raybaud, Matthew James Wilkinson & John Zois, Photography – Catherine Derry, Music – Liam Howlett, Visual Effects – Ghost VFX (Supervisors – Nicholas Bennett & Mark Epstein), Special Effects Designer – Daniel Martin, Makeup Effects – 13 Fingers FX, Makeup Design – Scarlett O’Connell, Production Design – Anna Papa, Curs>r Game Design & Graphics – Jonathan Howells. Production Company – Anton Productions/Stigma Films.
Cast
Iola Evans (Kayla Edwards), Asa Butterfield (Isaac), Angela Griffin (Thea Edwards), Ryan Gage (Lance), Eddie Marsan (Hal), Kate Fleetwood (Laura), Pete Machale (Gabe), Joe Bolland (Beck), Silvana Montoya (Carmella), Caroline Loncq (Maria), Robert Englund (Voice of Himself)
Plot
While visiting her computer geek friend Isaac, Kayla Edwards finds an old 1980s computer game called Curs>r. While in a cafe later, she loads the game up whereupon it offers her a series of choices – only for her selections to start affecting what is happening around her as the waitress is made to eat broken glass and Kayla is forced to choose what the girl’s fate is. In a subsequent round, Kayla is forced to make choices as rats attack her mother, where the only option is for her mother to leap from the apartment window. Kayla gets Isaac’s help to try and hack the code and stop the game killing more people.
Choose of Die was a feature-length directorial debut for Toby Meakins who had previously made short films. The script comes from Simon Allen, who had done assorted work in British television. The biggest black mark against screenwriter Simon Allen is that he was creator of the abortion that was the Terry Pratchett adaptation The Watch (2020).
Choose or Die holds interest from the opening scene where Eddie Marsan finds his computer prompts talking back to him. A little later, there is a grisly scene where Iola Evans is working at a table in a late-night cafe and the waitress (Silvana Montoya) starts being influenced by the game’s malevolent choices to the point where Iola is trying to make Silvana stop smashing glasses and eating the broken shards.
However, the more Choose or Die goes on, the more it becomes evident that each scene is set up to feature a novelty set-piece where the game influences reality. Some of these we don’t even see – the scene where mother Angela Griffin is attacked by rats is only portrayed in terms of screen graphics. And as the set-pieces go on, they start to seem more and more ridiculous and even less constructed with any coherent schema.
(l to r) Iola Evans and Asa Butterfield discover the cursed videogame
The height of ridiculousness is a scene where Asa Butterfield vomits up yards of videotape and then does so in reverse as Iola Evans hits the fast-forward and reverse buttons on a VCR. Although this is triumphed in terms of absurdity by the scene where Iola Evans enters Eddie Marsan’s home and they fight in a battle that involves them for some reason inflicting damage on themselves that then gets enacted on the other person. By this point, you feel like any rational schema the film had has devolved to something it is more or less making up as it goes along.
However, what finally decided me that I didn’t like the film was its unlikeable moral equivalences at the ending. The whole thrust of the film is Iola Evans trying to stop being a part of a game that inflicts cruelty and suffering on random people. However, the film then reaches an ending where she realises she can use the game to exact retribution on the drug dealer (Ryan Gage) that preyed on her mother, along with Eddie Marsan well for no other real reason than that he started the game off. It’s like a pacifist protesting the killing of random people suddenly deciding it is okay as long as they are bad people.
Choose or Die is a film that has a potentially worthy premise and wrecks it by trying to turn it into something else. It should have been something like Max Reload that had a passion for the 1980s videogame that it is clearly rooted in. In fact, Asa Butterfield’s character should have been the central protagonist. In another film, Iola Evans would simply have been The Girlfriend – she has entry level experience with coding and zero knowledge of game history, while her sole summation of the era is summed up as “Fuck the Eighties” – and it feels as though the wrong person has been promoted to the centre of the film.
