It’s no big secret that Netflix has been struggling to cultivate profitable original franchises of its own, especially of the wide tentpole variety. But consider its latest algorithm addition, Toby Meakins’ directorial debut “Choose to Die,” the rare winner from their original film output—even though it’s more of a vision board of what it could be, the film introduces a nifty premise that recalls not just “A Nightmare on Elm Street” but how that series was able to make multiple irresistible sequels. “Choose or Die” is also the rare mid-budget Netflix movie that gets better and better as it goes along, owning its weirdness and not playing it easy.
Freddy Krueger himself gets in on the mix, with Robert Englund offering his snarling voice talents to a video game called “Curs>r,” which was made in the ‘80s and expresses itself in 8-bit formatting. The game comes with a $125,000 prize, which is a real way that video game developers lured gamers to play. But more on the game itself in a bit, as this movie is about a modern player named Kayla, portrayed by Iola Evans. She is aggressively scripted to be a character with a great need for that money—her mother is sick with addiction and is hounded by a predator drug dealer, their apartment is close to eviction, and she has a job scrubbing floors at an ominous empty office for a company called Kismet (the latter a plot point that could use more care, but is fittingly ominous). On top of all that, Kayla is dealing with the trauma of her younger brother dying in a pool years ago. She’s talented with coding and old technology and shares that fascination with her friend Isaac (Asa Butterfield), a game designer of the more contemporary variety.
Kayla makes a big mistake, as characters do in the movies that inspired “Choose or Die,” by dabbling with evil forces: in this case, playing the game Curs>r. She loads up the game at a diner and is confronted with questions that are specific to her experience but initially seem innocent. Suddenly, “Coffee or Cake?” leads to leads to an innocent woman helplessly eating glass, shard by shard, in one of the movies’ well-executed squeamish moments. Kayla passes round one, and her screen calls her a “worthy player.”
Of course, one cannot escape the game—that’s where the title comes from, often written in pushy caps lock (“CHOOSE OR DIE!”), but this movie is too good for that catchphrase to be as silly as it sounds. Kayla has to trudge through each surprise level 24 hours after the last one, and her loved ones are roped into the mix, including Isaac. The two prove to be underwhelming surrogates on their own in this experience, even though they have good buddy banter in the movie’s slower scenes.
While the film holds your attention, there are flaws with the game itself and how it plays into the narrative that hold back the movie from being scary. There seems to be no real way to win a level, and instead, it takes on the unreality of Krueger’s night terrorism, when you more or less are at his whim, that there are essentially no rules. The two players—a missing opportunity for a batch of future-dead teenagers to be used—then face torture, more or less, without there being a clear way to “win.” And yet Kelly and Isaac do, somehow. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it makes for images like a character vomiting out streams of blood and VHS tapes, which is striking pop art, if not exactly nightmarish.
Cinematographer Stephanie Derry has an eye-catching instinct with a lot of the movie’s empty spaces and heavy uses of red, blue, and especially green lighting—it’s striking if not downright cool whenever the location the game is activated in turns green, showing how Curs>r’s reach is well beyond a console or a screen but over any space possible. And even when the game itself doesn’t make sense, it has the confidence of its pulsing 8-bit-inspired soundtrack, sharp editing, and general ambition. An entire scare sequence with … yes, a giant rat in a labyrinth, takes place with only a screaming voice on the phone, which is visualized like an 8-bit maze. It’s bold, it works, and it makes you want to see more.
“Choose or Die” is even surprising in how it plays with nostalgia—it’s not as sacred with earlier eras of entertainment as something like Netflix’s series “Stranger Things” or the horror trilogy “Fear Street.” Instead, it builds from the familiarity but shows the sinister rot to the era’s fantasy, how perverse they can seem in hindsight. This sentiment may be no less true than when Kayla says, “The ’80s sucks!” in which the script’s creatively designated villain then incredulously says, “THE ’80S SUCKS?!” The movie then proceeds to have an authentic, twisty way of getting to a cliffhanger, showing the cleverness that writer Simon Allen has primarily been striving for.
At 84 minutes and with its minimal cast, the movie is lean but opens the door to a new force of evil, in this case, a video game. The possibilities are too expansive to resist with “Choose or Die,” including a stronger sequel that has some more airtight writing. Let’s hope that Netflix does the wise thing and lets us see it. [B]