Countdown Review
By Colton Gomez | 03/24/24 | 10:46 P.M. Mountain Time
Horror, Mystery| Rated PG-13 | 1 hr 30 min | Film Release Date: October 25, 2019
If you had an app that tells you when you die, would you download it or would you use caffeine and stress to blindly speed up the process like the rest of us? The natural human condition is to avoid death but doing so in this film gets you stalked by a demon and traumatized before you die. If I knew the exact time of my death, I think I would be relieved either way. If I had a long time before my death, I would carry on as normal and plan for a stronger future. If I had a short amount of time before my death, I would of course be filled with anxiety, but a lot of worry of the future would fade and I would focus on making my experience the fullest it can be which excludes watching this movie.
This film wants to be topical and right, sensitive and demanding, funny and scary. It tries to be too many things for too many people. Inevitably, in doing so, it becomes a film for no one. There is no depth to any of these topics. The payoffs are poorly done and not worth the investment. It spends so much time running in place that it goes nowhere. I want to see the main actress, Elizabeth Lail, succeed but with a script like this, it is like asking a penguin to fly.
Our main character, nurse Quinn, discovers she’s due to die in a couple days and tries everything to get other people to save her. The malicious app that displays only a countdown to the user’s death in years, months, days, hours, and seconds is a 21st century endeavor of a demon that gets to torment people if they learn their death date and try to prevent it.
The premise is semi-interesting but that is where the interest ends. There is nothing interesting about Quinn: tragic family backstory now separates her from her remaining family members because she feels guilty and hates losing people she loves—you’ve seen it all before and done better elsewhere. What follows is a snooze-fest backstory trade between Quinn and Matt, (a guy who Quinn falls in love with because they share the same aversion to death) a biblical explanation for the app, unscary scare attempts, one-dimensional characters and equivalent acting.
There is so much time-wasting in this film that it insults the audience by what it thinks it can pass off as story. The opening scene is an eight-minute underage drinking commercial that takes place at the lamest party even the band geeks would not be caught dead in. Since when do teenagers call sitting at a dining room table talking about fitness apps and sipping beer partying? The main girl in this scene serves only to introduce the audience to the rules of the world. The same formula exists for each character who downloads the app that we follow: Character is introduced and urged to download the app, character overhears people exclaiming their long life left to live, character looks down and sees small number, character is scared but say they do not believe it, character dies.
This scene should have been much shorter, been much more efficient with its dialogue, and respected the audience’s time. I get the feeling that the girl in the opening is someone’s daughter or niece and they wanted her to have as much screen time as possible. It is very simple: App=death timer, no takebacks.
The demon at the center of the film fulfills a person’s death even if they try to prevent it. It can yank people several feet into the air without being seen or pull them across the room while remaining undetected, except for a tacky screech. If it can do these amazing supernatural, electromagnetic feats, surely it can give its own app more than a 3.6/5-star rating on the play store. How did the app get created in the first place? Did the demon code the app?
There is one scene, above all, that makes the least sense, is the most frustrating to watch, and is the most insulting. About halfway through the movie, Quinn goes to the hospital on her day off to ask the hospital priest a question. As she’s leaving, a nurse spots her and asks her into a room where the hospital administrator, a representative of the board of directors, and the doctor who sexually harassed her are all waiting. The purpose of this hearing or faux court is to tell Quinn that she’s suspended immediately because the hospital heard the doctor’s version of the harassment and just decided it was true. Quinn was not interviewed or questioned, nobody checked the cameras, heard her scream, or even bothered to check out any further details as to the legitimacy of the doctor’s claim.
The reason this scene makes me so mad is because Quinn was not supposed to even be at the hospital in the first place, and suddenly there is a scheduled meeting all about her and for her that she was not informed of. This scene is so obviously one-sided against Quinn and the fact that the film tries to pass it off as a legitimate scene and plot point is deeply insulting. It is a pathetic attempt to get us to hate the doctor and be mad for Quinn. It is so poorly done. I understand that there are one-sided meetings all over the place in favor of men in power over female subordinates, but this film does not try with this scene. There is no nuance, no subtext, nothing else going on in the scene. It is saying only one thing: be mad at the doctor for Quinn.
This film is about nothing. It has nothing to say. It does nothing interesting with its characters or premise. There is no real point in seeing this movie unless you are looking to be frustrated and bored. This film could be saying read the terms and conditions, beware of technology, spend more time with family, the real monsters are predators, but it never commits to any of these, rather, it opts for a general feeling: I don’t want to die, which is hardly worth anything.
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