Hey what's up guys. Today I'll show you a thriller-drama film: "Choose or Die "!
Spoiler ahead, watch out and take care! The movie begins with a mother scolding
her teenage son. The son argues with her too. Upstairs, his father shuts the door to his office.
His mind is far from family squabbles. The father is an avid collector of vintage video games,
and had just obtained a copy of the elusive game Curs>r. It's an interactive text-based game from
the 80s, that allows players to choose how their destiny plays it while on a fantasy quest.
The first choice revolves around whether the player would seize, or leave a chalice he had
found in a cave. At that moment, the father grabs a beer and drinks it. Without even pushing a
button, the game registers that he had chosen to seize the chalice. The next question asks
the father if he would like another chalice. He answers yes. The bottle on his table automatically
refills itself. He grabs it again, and sees that the label is urging him to turn around.
The game asks him again if he wants to leave the lights on or off. He presses a command, and the
lights in his room turn off. The record player starts playing various snippets of his wife and
son's argument. The son is mocking the mother, for putting up with his father's obsession with retro
video games. The next question asks him to choose between his son's tongue or his wife's ears. The
father can either choose or die. The father tries to run away, and the monitor emits a high-pitched
sound that brings him to his knees. When the father comes down later,
he finds the mother holding a knife, and their son's cut-off-tongue in her other hand.
Blood is pouring out of his son's mouth, and tears stream down his face. However,
he can no longer voice out anything more than a whimper. The mother exclaims that she didn't
know what possessed her to do such a thing. Upstairs, the monitor shows that the father had
chosen his son's tongue earlier, resulting in the mother inexplicably cutting off the tongue.
The father moves to the next level; and the game asks him to come back and play again tomorrow.
A montage plays. It asks the father to choose between the mother's flesh or the son's arm.
He chooses her flesh. For the next level, the game forces him to choose between the mother's
head or the son's eye. He chooses the latter. When he reaches level 3, the game asks him if he would
like to continue, or if he would like to make copies of the game. Eager to stop the nightmare,
the father makes several copies. He is ordered by the game, to distribute them in exchange
for his family's safety. Three months later, Kayla,
a young college student working as a cleaner, has just finished a grueling shift as dawn
breaks over the city. She heads straight to her friend Isaac's apartment. He is a programmer,
who is currently working on designing a game. She sells him equipment in exchange for some cash.
While rifling around Isaac's dark and dusty apartment, Kayla finds one of the copies of
Curs>r. Written on the front cover is a message, saying that there is a 125,000 dollars prize for
anyone who completes the game. Intrigued, Kayla calls the number written on the cover as well. A
voice recording of a famous Hollywood horror actor plays, saying that they need to enter
a four-digit code, which is shown on screen after they successfully finish the game.
Kayla is eager to start the game, so she can get much-needed money. She asks Isaac
to meet him at a cafe later that night. Afterward, Kayla goes to her mother's apartment.
Her mother has been suffering from psychological issues, ever since Kayla's brother died.
To add to that, her mother's landlord enables her drug addiction, and exploits her by
selling her into prostitution. Hours later, Kayla goes to work.
She wonders why the office building pays them to clean the floors night after night,
despite it being empty. Kayla's pregnant co-worker doesn't really care, as long as they pay her.
After her shift, Kayla goes to the nearly-empty cafe, to load the game on her computer.
She starts the first level. The game begins by pointing at the menu beside the screen.
It asks her to choose between coffee or cake. Curiously, the menu now only has two choices:
coffee or cake. She chooses coffee, and the waitress suddenly appears and pours her coffee.
Kayla is surprised; and the waitress tells her that she does not look okay.
The screen starts showing the waitress' words on-screen. The game asks if she needs a break.
Kayla abruptly closes the laptop. But suddenly, her reality shifts. She is now in the middle of
a foggy area; and her dead younger brother is telling her to choose or die.
Kayla opens the laptop, and chooses yes to the question about taking a break. The waitress
starts breaking glasses. The game asks if the waitress should break more glasses or clean up.
Kayla chooses the second option. To her shock, the waitress kneels, and chews all the glass
pieces. Kayla begs the waitress to stop; but she cries out that she can't stop.
Kayla tries to run to the waitress to stop her; but her boss wakes up from napping on one of
the nearby tables, and emits a loud shriek. Still, Kayla makes her way to the waitress,
as she chews on more glass pieces; and blood spurts from her mouth.
The next thing Kayla remembers is her waking up in her room. She hears her mother talking
with a police officer, who got to the scene of the waitress' suicide last night.
Kayla heads out to work. She encounters the landlord, and warns him to stay away from her
mother. He taunts her with a job rejection letter, that he stole from her mailbox.
Finally, he offers her money. But of course, nothing ever comes free from the landlord.
Later that day, Kayla goes to Isaac. She tells him what happened;
and Isaac is reluctant to believe her. Still, he promises to research where the game is from.
Kayla is working alone in the building that night. Her mother calls her,
panicking that the rats are getting to her. When Kayla hangs up, the lights on the floor turn off;
and a nearby monitor flickers to life. It shows that Kayla is now playing in level 2.
A rough layout of their apartment appears on the screen, with the rat on one end and her mother
on the other. Her mission as the player is to guide the rat toward her mother. Kayla works
hard to circumvent her mission, by locking the rat in one of the rooms, and guiding her mother
through a call to the front door. However, the rat breaks out and starts gnawing at the bedroom door,
that her mother has hidden behind. As a last recourse, she orders her mother to jump from her
bedroom window to escape. Kayla completes level 2; and the game tells her to be back again tomorrow.
She smashes the monitor, and is caught by her boss, who subsequently fires her.
Her mother is severely injured, and ends up being hospitalized. Kayla goes back home,
and sees the destruction wreaked by the rat in their apartment. The landlord appears
once again, and offers to get Kayla into prostitution. She refuses him once again.
Kayla turns to Isaac for help. But so far, he hasn't found anything about the game's origin.
While waiting for level 3 to start, they order Chinese food,
and share a light-hearted conversation. Isaac's record player blares to life, and emits
a high-pitched noise. He manages to isolate the noise, and extricate the game's code. But
the symbols appearing on-screen are far from the regular programming languages they are familiar
with. Level 3 starts; and the instructions describe Isaac, guessing everything he is about
to say. Isaac guesses that the weird symbols are allowing the game to alter reality. Then the game
asks Kayla to choose or die. When she doesn't respond, it emits a hurtful high-pitched noise.
Isaac starts the game; and the noise stops. Two doors, one blue and one red, appear in front
of them. When Isaac presses his ear on the blue door, he hears Kayla's younger brother whispering
"die" from behind it. They choose the red door instead, and it opens of its own accord.
They walk through the door, and enter a series of tunnels of what appears to be a public swimming
pool. Kayla hears her brother telling her that he wants to go swimming. They finally arrive at a
mist-filled swimming pool. Kayla reveals that this pool is where her brother drowned years ago.
Against Isaac's pleas, Kayla dives into the pool to save her brother. Isaac follows after her. They
aren't really surrounded by water; but a thick fog instead. Kayla and Isaac get separated. Isaac is
attacked from behind by a creature that looks like Kayla's brother. She finds the two of them slumped
unconscious on the ground. The game asks Kayla to choose between Isaac and her brother. She chooses
to save Isaac. but her brother comes to life and attacks her. She overpowers him, and chokes him to
death. Isaac wakes up; and the screen tells them that they have completed level 3.
Later on, in Isaac's apartment, Kayla confesses what happened the day her brother died.
She was in charge of watching him, as he played in the pool. She looked away for a few seconds;
and then her brother drowned. Kayla always felt that it was her fault; and she carried
her guilt with her. Isaac comforts her, and tells her that she has to forgive herself.
Afterward, Isaac informs her that he had managed to hack the game's code, using the
dial tones of the voice recording. He traced the call to a warehouse facility upstate.
He and Kayla head there. The facility looks abandoned, and is populated with
rusting containers. They enter a large and empty warehouse, where the same recording
is playing on a loop. The sound is coming from a machine on top of a wooden desk.
Isaac spies several huge power cables, and traces them to an adjoining room, filled with old TVs and
a bulletin board with papers. Kayla finds several tape recordings, and pops one on the VCR.
The video dates back to 19 84; and it shows an inventor with wild eyes,
narrating that he had found the curse embedded in the symbols he used for the video game.
However, even he didn't know where the curse came from, or what it means.
The legend said that whenever the symbols are used against someone, pain and trauma are inflicted on
the cursed, while the person who inflicts the curse, reaps benefits. The inventor planned
on using the symbols in the video games; so he could get the rewards after causing pain.
As an example, the inventor had recruited a test subject with the promise of money. He locked the
subject inside a small room with a computer. When the game started, it asked the subject to choose
whether to eat the computer, or eat his arm. The subject jokingly chose to eat his arm. Then,
the inventor sliced his own arm; and the subject was inexplicably forced to eat his own arm.
Back in the warehouse, the monitor blinks; and the inventor on-screen tells Kayla and
Isaac that they are now in level 4. The game traps Isaac inside it, and asks Kayla if she
wants to rewind or fast forward. She chooses fast forward; and Isaac begins to spit out meters of
cassette tape. She then chooses to rewind; and the tape goes back inside Isaac's esophagus.
Throughout all this, Isaac is in pain. Finally, he collapses on the floor, with blood spurting
from his mouth. Kayla holds him as he dies. The computer beeps and announces that Kayla has
completed level 4. It shows her the coordinates of where the final fight will take place.
Kayla drives to the address indicated. When she gets there, the landlord calls her,
and tells her that he is with her mother now, and he'll be taking care of her. Kayla is frustrated
that she can't save her mother now; but she has to finish the game first and get out alive.
The coordinates lead her to the house of the family, shown at the beginning of the film.
She finds the father, mother, and son sitting at the dinner table. They are all wearing
dark clothes; and the son has magazine cut-outs taped to cover his eye and mouth.
The mother has a nasty scar on her face. Kayla tells him that the game sent her to him
for a boss fight. The mother tries to stab her husband; but he stops her. The father laughs,
and says that he isn't the villain; he's the hero. He shares that he had found the
game in a clearance sale, because he's a collector of 80s game memorabilia.
The final fight begins. The father hurls a vase at Kayla's head; but he's the one who experienced
the pain. This means that whatever they inflict on each other, they will be the ones who will
feel it. So Kayla slices her hand; and sure enough, the father is the one who feels it.
The son comes in with a gun, and mistakenly shoots Kayla. but the bullet is felt by his father.
He calls his son an idiot, and orders him to shoot Kayla. The scared son
obeys and shoots her in the arm. Kayla stumbles backward onto the patio
as the wife, fed up with her husband's cruelty, grabs the gun and shoots him by shooting Kayla.
But the father grabs the gun from her, and shoots his head. However,
the gun doesn't have any bullets left. Kayla runs toward the heavy sculpture in
the middle of the patio. She drags it to the nearby pool, while the father starts slicing
his throat to finally kill her. But Kayla drops into the pool first with the sculpture;
so she drowns the father to death. The game ends; and Kayla is the winner.
The wife rescues her from the bottom of the pool, and treats her wounds. She assures Kayla that the
police will never know about her involvement. Right then, Kayla's phone flickers with the
game's symbols. It turns out, Kayla's prize for winning the game is she gets to control the game,
and inflict pain on others. And she knows exactly who she wants to suffer.
She contacts the landlord, and tells him that she's ready to sell him her body.
But on one condition: she will be in control. The landlord eagerly agrees.
The game starts for him. He experiences excruciating pain, as his body is forced to
move from his room, to the sink that's filled with sharp needles by drug users. He plunges his face
onto the needles, and dies a painful death. As he screams, the wounds on her face heal. Her mother
also makes a miraculous recovery. This is because Kayla is now benefitting from the curse, as the
one using the game on others who suffer. Sometime later, Kayla gets the call. It's the
inventor, who still looks young and is now the head of a successful company, that owns the
building Kayla used to clean. He had profited from the pain, that the game he created had inflicted
on others, receiving good fortune and riches in exchange. He tells Kayla that she has won,
and asks her what she wants to do next with the game. The movie ends with Kayla answering that
she only wants to use the game to inflict pain on those who truly deserve it.
This's Daniel CC movie channel! Stay safe and enjoy your day!