Choose or Die Parent Guide

Kayla (Iola Evans), a broke college dropout, has been making ends meet by cleaning corporate offices at night. She also looks after her mother, Thea (Angela Griffin), who is housebound and has struggled with drug addiction since the drowning death of her youngest child. Tough as that is, things are about to get a lot worse.

While playing what she assumed was a harmless 80’s text-based video game called CURS>R, Kayla finds that the game can influence reality in horrifying and dangerous ways, forcing a nearby waitress to start eating broken glass. When Kayla survives that first level, the game ominously promises another challenge at the same time the next night. Terrified, she turns to her friend Isaac (Asa Butterfield) a computer-obsessed aspiring game developer, to help her find a way to stop the game from hurting anyone else. But she’s going to need more than IT support to end the nightmare…

Although Iola Evans does her best to keep this gory indie horror on the rails, the film seems determined to get lost in the weeds. As always, the more the movie explains the actual cause of all the bloody fun, the less fun it is. With a few exceptions, studios seem incapable of conjuring up a moderately scary explanation, or at least something which isn’t going to give the audience an acute case of tonal whiplash. The closer we get to uncovering the cause of the carnage, the less I was able to care.

And trust me, there’s plenty of carnage to be had. I have some major dental sensitivity, and it’s just about the only thing in movies that can still ick me right out, so the scene of a young woman being forced to eat broken glass just about made me shed my skin and slither into the vents to hide. Of course, the movie doesn’t stop there – I’ll also give a more general warning that if you’re not a fan of needles, you’re really going to hate the end of this movie. This mélange of gruesome imagery is accompanied by a hefty helping of profanity, which may be understandable in context, but is not appropriate for family audiences.

But if you’re a committed horror fan, looking for a way to kill about 80 minutes, and you just love that low-budget slasher feel, then this is the film for you. You will be completely undeterred by the increasing goofiness of the plot, the occasionally dodgy effects, or Asa Butterfield’s indeterminate American accent. You’re just here for the broken glass, which is good, because there isn’t much else.