Countdown will leave you counting the minutes until you’re not watching it anymore
Film Reviews moviereview
There isn’t too much genuine fright fare hitting theaters this Halloween season. That’s good news for Countdown, a new horror movie about an app that tells you the exact moment you’re going to croak, and bad news for anyone who buys a ticket to Countdown hoping to be scared. Really, the only terrifying thing about this dopey, hackneyed, PG-13 creepfest is what it says about the world. Are we all really so obsessed with the little computers we carry around in our pockets that Hollywood is now building entire plots, entire movies, around their applications? Hell, this isn’t even the first smartphone horror flick of the month, though it definitely might be the first feature-length warning about the dangers of skimming or ignoring user agreements.
Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail), the young nurse heroine of Countdown, certainly doesn’t read them. It’s on a whim that she downloads the mysterious Countdown app, skipping right past the terms and conditions to find out, down to the second, how much life she has left. While her coworkers at the hospital laugh off the ominous timer installed on their devices—maybe because it promises them a very distant death—Quinn is a little unnerved by her numerical prophecy, the mere three days it puts on her clock. Then again, even those looking at 70 more years or so might wish they hadn’t downloaded the cursed app, which can’t be deleted, takes up 60 GB of space (!), and emits an annoying shriek every few hours, its push notifications going off like one of those seasonal motion-sensor witch decorations people hang outside their homes every October. Truly spooky stuff.
Of course, knowing exactly when they’re going to die might lead a person to, you know, try to sidestep their impending doom. Horror movies have gotten some mileage out of self-fulfilling prophecies; one of the scariest moments in this year’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark hinged on a teenager sealing his own fate by trying to swerve around it. In Countdown, changing your plans to avoid a date with the Grim Reaper results in a “breach in user contract,” summoning a demonic force determined to make good on the prediction. It’s a real “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation: Blow off the surgery you’re scheduled to die during and some specter will just toss your ass down a flight of stairs instead. What’s unclear is whether the app actually abbreviates lifespans. If it does, why does it screw over some users and not others? If it doesn’t, then what does it matter if you even download it, right?
Perhaps these are not questions conducive to enjoying a movie as convoluted and conceptually moronic as Countdown. It’s the kind of half-baked pastiche of a thriller that gives one a deeper appreciation for the films it’s shamelessly ripping off. The premise recalls Final Destination, except that the fun in that series was in how, exactly, death was going to fill its quota; here, instead of some unexpected, hilariously elaborate Rube Goldberg device of destruction, we get… a generic CGI ghoul, using its poltergeist powers to toss the marked around like rag dolls. There’s a touch of The Ring, too, in the film’s ticking-clock scenario, and Countdown inherits the arguable flaw of that suspense device, which is that knowing exactly when a character is going to die sort of neutralizes any potential danger en route to the moment of truth. But the Ring movies at least approach the build up stylishly, playing creepy games of escalation and intimidation. Here, director Justin Dec, who also wrote the screenplay, stages the jump scares with a perfunctory, workmanlike indifference. You’ll shrug off every jolt.
Even at just 90 minutes, Countdown limps over the finish line. To fill out its skimpy running time, the film piles on a bunch of inessential subplots: a quasi-romance with another of the app’s victims (Jordan Calloway); some familial tension involving Quinn’s little sister (Talitha Eliana Bateman) and their recently deceased mother; and most incongruously, a whole storyline about Quinn dealing with sexual harassment on the job. There’s also some labored if modestly amusing comic relief in the form of a sarcastic phone-store clerk (Tom Segura) and a priest (P.J. Byrne) who seems to have embraced the holy life out of a fanboyish obsession with demon mythology. The whole thing plays like a logline unconvincingly stretched and twisted into an actual movie, as though someone procrastinated on planning for their meeting with a producer and then bullshitted a whole pitch in the 15 minutes beforehand. Forget cheating death. In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.
83 Comments
First of all, Dowd, that is a wonderful headline.
Second of all, it’s hard to be scared of a monster that can be stopped by blocking app store purchases.
Or you can just install the thing, but switch off the app permission for “impending fatalist death”.
I saw the trailer for this when I went to see Zombieland 2 the other day.And holy shit, I’ve never checked my watch during a trailer before, but I did at least twice during it.
So this is a modern tech version of The Appointment in Samarra story. An app that only tells you when, but not how, you’re gonna die isn’t ready to go on the market.
“I was simply surprised to see you in the marketplace, because Facebook sent me an event reminder for meeting you in Samarra.”
Phone Bad! What if Phone kill!?
Shhhh! You’re ruining the plot to my Black Mirror script!
I feel like more time could have been spent talking about how the app is 60GB. I need to know more.
Seriously. Did she buy a new SD card just for that one app?If this movie had come out twenty years ago, I’d say that the writer simply didn’t understand what a gigabyte was. But it’s baffling to me that anyone who owns a phone would choose a number so absurdly large.
To expand on that point, 60GB is 64,424,509,440 bits.
They should’ve made it 666 MB.
Seriously. It’s RIGHT THERE and they bypass it for this strange 60 gig choice.
Nice.
And that’s before all the updates.
Yet another poorly coded app pushed to market too quickly and bogged down with bloated features. Did they really need to add messaging and image filters?!
AND why does it need permission to access my microphone and camera?
49 GB of the app is your run-of-the mill collection of user location and personal data, which can easily be resold to make up for the lack of a purchase price for the app. Honestly, the untimely audible shrieking is the least-intrusive part of the app.
Demons don’t compress.
Scariest part right there.
That’s room for the digital demon!
Total uncompressed size for an iOS app has to be under 4GB, so unless the app is downloading additional content, that’s an issue right there. And if it is downloading and storing more data (new scream files?) you’d think you could do a network trace to track down Satan’s server and get to the heart of who’s behind all this.There’s just a whole infosec angle I feel like they dropped the ball on here.
Surely downloading 60gb onto a phone would take ages? It certainly wouldn’t leave her very “mobile”.Thanks you’ve been a great audience, try the veal!
Really, I think enough people die every day. You don’t need an app to add onto those statistics.Who makes an app for counting down your demise? What is there to gain? These movies about a killer [blank] have interesting ideas but never want to scratch beneath the surface of their premise.
If you marketed an app like this – basically a countdown clock that chooses a random time somewhere between 3 days and 40 years in the future – I’ll bet it would be a viral sensation, and then there would be a string of news articles about people behaving as though the predictions were correct.
What is there to gain?
If you have a while to go: You’re free from the fear of an untimely death.If it’s soon: You can plan your life and make sure you don’t waste it.
I recall the commentary (2002!) for Final Destination 2 where the director was talking about one idea that he didn’t get to explore: If it’s not your “turn” in the death line, you are basically invincible. I was struck by how interesting it would be to see the Rube Goldbergian machinations to keep someone alive if they were behaving recklessly or trying to kill themselves to short-circuit Death’s plan, etc.
The manifestation of Death in the FD films seems like he’d be okay with turning 50% of the world’s population into “invincible” quadriplegics and/or vegetables.
That legitimately sounds like a great body horror film. Like reduce the protagonist down over the run time till they’re just a head and spine with organs attached, thumping against a wall. “Can’t kill me, brah! I’m invincible” Awesome.
That definitely sounds like a cool approach they might have explored in at least one of the sequels.This one seems like they missed an opportunity where the app might have sent you useful push notifications, like “stop and get a Big Gulp at the nearest 7-11″, and it turns out you need it to extinguish a fire or something. And the time displayed could abruptly change after you make certain decisions, like whether or not to go to a movie with your friends. The lead character could have a grand old time lengthening their life expectancy, and then find that picking up a $5 bill suddenly dramatically shortens it… then getting rid of the $5 doesn’t help! What the hell does it want me to do!
This sounds kind of like a horror version of the accounting system in The Good Place.
Satan Friended Me, this fall on CBS
Please write this movie. This is AMAZING.
I think they mean what is to gain for the company that makes it.
Think of the ad revenue from the undertaker and cementary plot industries! People normally put off these decisions because they don’t want to think about them and figure they have years to choose. But somebody who has only months or days to live is a great advertising target!
Nice specification of feature length when talking about user agreement horror.It sounds like South Park did it better in HumancentIpad over 8 years ago.
Ha! Had the same song going through my head. Now, when will we get the John E. Smoke Cinematic Universe?
Anyone under 60 who installs an app on their phone that’s bigger than the operating system deserves whatever happens.Also I really thought it would be a Final Destination rip-off as far as the killings buta generic CGI ghoul, using its poltergeist powers to toss the marked around like rag dolls
is just egregiously stupid. I’m sorry you had to watch this.
If it was a rip-off of those movies, wouldn’t it be the … Final Countdown?
OH-frickin-bligatory.
App permissions required:- photos- files- your soul
I’m more interesting in the story behind VC investing in this terrible app. Plus the CEO’s eventually po-faced appearance in front of Congress .
We’re the tech bros that disrupted death!
And if you try to regulate us, you’ll just make sure the future of death is Chinese!
it was funded by the Lonis Edison foundation, obviously
“The guys behind Juicero have done it again!”
“We put the ‘Death’ in DRM.”
Good gravy, that second still is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen. It looks like a rejected stock photo.
You see, every point you raised in this review is precisely why I actually want to see it. I went and saw Truth or Dare knowing precisely how bad the trailers made it look, specifically because of how bad the trailers made it look.If anything, I’d have been disappointed if this wasn’t hot garbage.
Read The Immortalists for a good take on the same idea.
The thing that bugged me about Final Destination was that it always opened with a premonition of exactly what would happen…but then never again.And it never made sense to me that these random people had a complete 100% vision of how they’d all die…but going forward after that it was all vague hints/signs.But at least there, you had the idea that your death was inevitable and the best you could do is luck out and avoid it a few times before things caught up to you.Here? The app doesn’t really do anything. If you never download it you could still die in three days.
wow never even thought about that. this was their fate, not the fate the demon made.
Yup, the real horror would be knowing. And unlike Final Destination there wouldn’t be a damn thing you can do about it.
Man, fuck you and fuck your autoplaying videos.
So this is pretty much the movie they mock in Forgetting Sarah Marshall?“Why would a mobile phone kill anyone? Doesn’t make sense. How can a mobile phone have an agenda and kill people…”“Why couldn’t you just take the battery out of the phone?”
I think they were probably specifically making fun of the 2006 film Pulse, which K-Bell starred in before Sarah Marshall (and is a remake of a Japanese horror movie that I haven’t seen; maybe the original is better). Also a 2006 release: Stay Alive, about a killer videogames, as well as Final Destination 3. Basically, except for the tech that didn’t quite exist 13 years ago, this movie sounds like 2006 nostalgia.
If I’m not mistaken, that’s not the case actually, and it was a giant coincidence. They basically thought about the dumbest idea they could think of and used it, and Kristen Bell was not thrilled because she thought they were mocking her movie, and per interviews I think I’ve seen with her and others, they actually had no idea that movie existed when they wrote that scene.
The co-writers of Sarah Marshall said they’d never heard of Pulse when they wrote that joke.
You haven’t seen Kairo? Really? It’s a hallmark horror film. It’s really good and it’s also a great example of the oughts fad of American remakes of Japanese horror films completely missing the point. It’s a slow, surreal work that creeps its way into disconcerting horror. The American version actually tried to give some semblance of an answer (and needless jump scares) to what was happening, which… well, it’s not a story that needs definitive answers.
The original Pulse is one of the best horror films ever made.
Because the stupid things all have sealed batteries you can’t remove these days?
so you let it run out of charge, and the demon at least won’t be able to track you to 3 meters.
Didn’t this used to be an episode of ‘The IT Crowd’?
Can someone explain to me why they made a movie about a smartphone app that kills people, and didn’t call it “Killer App”?
I preferred this when it was an episode of the IT crowd.
“What’s unclear is whether the app actually abbreviates lifespans. If it does, why does it screw over some users and not others? If it doesn’t, then what does it matter if you even download it, right?”Sounds like a really lame version of “Nick of Time,” one of the best Twilight Zones ever. Shatner and his wife find a fortune-telling machine in a small town and he becomes obsessed with it. She begs him to leave, he says “what if it’s all true?” and she responds with “ESPECIALLY if it’s all true!” She convinces him to live his life instead of being told how he’s going to live, and he escapes its power by literally just walking away from the thing. It’s one of the most baller things a Shatner character has ever done: sees that he’s in the fucking Twilight Zone and just walks out of it.
Thanks for the detail about Tom Segura as the sarcastic phone clerk. When I saw his name in the cast I wondered what the hell he was doing in this, but not enough to actually watch this garbage. Maybe some other Segura-fan will be kind enough to clip his scenes for my eventual youtubing enjoyment.
Thanks, Jeans.
Even shit movies pay better than standup. And you don’t have to ride a bus.
Doo doo doo dooooo… DOodoodoododoo…
Hollywood is really getting lazy about reusing these actress bot models. First that “Samara Weaving” Margot Robbie bot, and now this Evan Rachel Wood model bot.
Here’s another high tech/horror interface.
What If Phones, But Too Dumb?
A priest becoming a priest because they have a fanboy obsession with demon mythology? That’s great, he should get a spin-off with that Hot Priest from “Fleabag”
Recently I’ve been enjoying the film’s A.A Dowd has panned, but I think we might agree on this one. Still, bad horror films are my favourite thing to clean to, so, I WILL watch this if it comes to Netflix
The wide releases this weekend look freakin’ dire but thankfully The Lighthouse is opening in my neck of the woods this week, yahoo!
I will go to this movie only so I can shout “two from the top, four from everywhere else” ever 30 seconds.
I can’t tell if this is a step up or down for Lail’s from her role in Dead of Summer
“Countdown inherits the arguable flaw of that suspense device, which is that knowing exactly when a character is going to die sort of neutralizes any potential danger en route to the moment of truth”This is my problem with the Final Destination and Saw movies too. Since any non-lead is going to bite it via real-life Mouse Trap in the former or torture device in the latter, it loses all tension and I’m just impatiently asking for the Fangoria money shot already so we can continue with the movie.
This movie sounds low and loose. Oh well, I guess Tommy bunz will have to wait for his Oscar.