​FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: PLAY OR DIE (2019)

​PLAY OR DIE (2019)

​Welcome to Paranoia, the ultimate escape game. Rule #1: Nothing is real. Rule #2: One of you will die. Lucas and Chloe, two passionate gamers, decide to participate to Paranoia, a very exclusive escape game. After solving a first riddle, they make it to the location of the finale in an abandoned mental hospital, lost in a frightening forest. There, four other participants are waiting on them. They soon realize that only one of them will get out of there alive. Based on the best selling novel "Puzzle" by Franck Thilliez, with more than 330'000 copies sold: "Hellish settings, characters manipulated like puppets, all the key ingredients to great suspense. All the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly".

Dir. Jacques Kluger, 89 mins

The idea of games seems to be central to a host of horror films these days – you could no doubt reel off a whole host of movies with this concept at the core, twisted games with the winners being allowed to survive and the losers being brutally killed, often with the people involved having to kill or torture one another in the process. And we’ve covered our fair share over the years, though I do try not to overdo it – given the number of films in the pantheon, you could spend a year or more covering these alone. And Play or Die is – as the title would intimate – another example of deadly games with horribly high, real stakes for everyone involved…

Lucas and Chloe are both avid gamers, and the start of the film here seems to be reunited after some time apart. We find out they previously spent years trying to track down a secret game online called Paranoia, and Chloe claims that she’s now incredibly close to unlocking it. With a bit of tech wizardry, they’re soon off to a secret underground rave and – after beating a round of what I think is Street Fighter – they find themselves part of the game, locked in an abandoned asylum with a handful of other gamers. A series of fiendish puzzles ensue, each one serving up more danger than the last, until (inevitably – this is not even much of a spoiler) the game boils down to just Lucas and Chloe.

The whole thing looks decent, and the puzzles in the game feel reasonably believable – I’m stuffed if I could have figured some of them out. As things wear on, some of the traps and devices do begin to get a bit far-fetched, but I think the minute you go into something like this you have to suspend disbelief in order to really get something out of it. The acting performances were OK, if nothing mind-blowing, and the whole thing at large was an entertaining enough romp for a horror fan such as myself. After an hour or so of this one I was willing to give this a perfectly passable mark, something in the 6 or 6.5 range.

However – and I will say this without trying to spoil it – the ending to this movie is just terrible. We’d come to a point, really, where there was nothing else to do or add, but there just had to be something else for the filmmakers to throw in. To be fair, this is based on a novel, so I suppose if it was in the original source material then I shouldn’t really lay this at the feet of the director. But this unravels big time in the last fifteen minutes, and the mark I wanted to give it seemed to slide literally second by second. If you’d hit a home run – or even bunted it to first base – with the finale I’d have given this something perfectly decent, but this was a big-time strike out of an ending which is going to drag it down.

If you wanted to take a look for yourself, you’ll find this one on Sky Cinema – or at least you could at the time of writing – but brace yourself for it. You might get a bit more out of it, or be a bit more forgiving, if you have an idea what’s coming…

RATING: 3/10. Out of the many ‘do you wanna play a game’ style horror movies I’ve seen, sadly this has to rate among the worst. Most of it is perfectly serviceable, but you’re never secured a decent grade until the credits roll, and I just can’t let go of this finale – I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and I don’t mean that in a good way here! This had potential but it seemed to be frittered away – I’d be interested to check out the book and see if it goes down the same road as this one, or if it’s different to the end result here. Honestly I think you could do better even if this is just the sort of movie you love.

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