Film Review: Choose or Die (2022)

Choose or Die

Anton, Stigma Films

Netflix

Release date

15 April 2022

#whatonwhatsgood Express Review (by Jovin Tardif)

In Choose or Die, a broke college dropout, Kayla (Iola Evans) finds an 80s-style horror video game.  There is a chance to win an unclaimed $125,000 prize if she is up for playing the game.  What she doesn't know is that the game is cursed.   

The question is what sort of bad things will start happening in reality?  

Will she be able to beat the 1980s survival computer game on her own or with her friend Isaac (Asa Butterfield)?  Tune in to find out.

The premise is quite interesting.  The acting in the film is decent. It's kind of neat that you get a voice “cameo” by Robert Englund.  Enjoy!

Directed by

Toby Meakins

Written by

Toby Meakins, Simon Allen and Matthew James Wilkinson

Story by

Toby Meakins

Produced by

Matthew James Wilkinson, Sebastien Raybaud, and John Zois

Starring

Iola Evans as Kayla

Asa Butterfield as Isaac

Robert Englund as himself

Angela Griffin as Thea

Ryan Gage as Lance

Eddie Marsan as Hal

Kate Fleetwood as Laura

Pete Machale as Gabe

Kaylenn Aires Fonseca as Ricky

Ioanna Kimbook as Grace

Joe Bolland as Beck

George Hannigan as teen gamer

Cinematography

Catherine Derry

Edited by

Tommy Boulding and Mark Towns

Music by

Liam Howlett

Simon Allen discusses Choose or Die (2022)

“Something often goes missing with the supernatural when it’s presented in a longer narrative.  There’s a tendency to explain every single thing, to impose human motivation and agency. But I had a supernatural experience when I was 18 and it wasn’t like that at all! It was scary because it defied comprehension and any kind of easy or immediate interpretation. The rhythms of it were unrecognisable. It left me with a sense of terror but also wonder. That’s how Toby and I have always approached the supernatural in our short films.”

“I’m obsessed with the ‘80s, I always have been.  I had this random thought about the Cursor – the 8-bit block interface that was always flashing away on the screen of the second-hand computer I had when I was a kid – and then came the idea of an old tape-loading text-based game called CURS>R with an actual curse in it! It was quite a rudimentary conflation really but it had some fun, ironic resonance to it. The whole thing only really came alive when Toby said, ‘Well, you need somebody contemporary being menaced by this thing.’ That unlocked the idea of treating the ‘80s the way M.R. James treats Medieval Times. You could present the whole decade and its pop-culture artifacts as this ancient, mysterious chapter from The Dark Ages. And when you unlock that, you get into: ‘Why are so many people obsessed with the ‘80s? And why do so many movies and TV shows venerate it? What if we had a character to whom all the music and movies people like me assume everyone loves are just alien and irrelevant? What if this character doesn’t give a shit about THE GOONIES or LOST BOYS?’ As somebody in the film heretically says – ‘F*ck the 80s!’”

Toby Meakins discusses Choose or Die (2022)

“It’s why the supernatural manifestations in the work of classic ghost story writers like M.R. James are so terrifying – they’re uncanny, they scramble your senses, they don’t organise themselves neatly for your convenience.  That’s what we’ve tried to do with the horror in CHOOSE OR DIE but on a much bigger scale than before.”

“It’s a simple plot but that gives you the latitude to take big swings with the set pieces and the tone. We didn’t want to make a boring movie. And one of the ways to do that is to subvert expectations as much as you possibly can.”