Netflix’s Choose or Die somehow finds the dreary downside to a murderous video game

polygon.com:

Early on in Netflix’s proudly derivative new horror film Choose or Die, a mother brandishing a kitchen knife bickers with her teenage son over his father’s obsession with the 1980s. The reclusive father (Eddie Marsan) hides out in his man-cave, a room lined with retro gaming consoles. He sees his vintage computer flicker green until it displays a question: “His tongue or her ears? Choose or die.” What initially seems like a morbid role-playing game graduates to a terrifying reality: The option he takes will materialize into an actual punishment inflicted on either his wife or son.

The fetishization of the 1980s — its trends and pop culture, especially movies and music — is recalibrated to frightening ends in Toby Meakins’ Choose or Die. Unlike, say,Ready Player One, Simon Allen’s light script doesn’t wholly worship at the decade’s altar. Sure, overt references to A Nightmare on Elm Street, Gary Newman, and industrial music artist Fad Gadget proliferate throughout the film. The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett even provides the movie’s synth score. But Meakins and Allen want to interrogate the innate horrors of living exclusively in the past. It’s a smart lesson obscured by a kitschy script that feels like Allen is taking too much pleasure in his self-perceived importance.

In its basic features, the premise is an even more nightmarish take on Jumanji. Three months after the film’s opening events, Kayla (Iola Evans) leaves her janitorial job cleaning an empty office building aptly named “Kismet.” She’s a recent college dropout, a whiz with motherboards and coding who’s looking for a job in programming while caring for her ailing mother, who’s addicted to unspecified illegal drugs. The pair haven’t been the same since Kayla’s young