Choose or Die (2022)
Directed by Toby Meakins
No — Choose or Die is not especially woke, scoring 26 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
A cursed text adventure, a broke coder named Kayla, and a prize of $125,000 that no sensible person would claim.
Consciousness Markers
The lead, Kayla, is played by Black actress Iola Evans, and the cast is notably diverse for a British horror film, though the character's race is never a plot point.
The predatory rent collector Lance exploits and prostitutes Kayla's mother to keep her housed, and the game's creator profits from the suffering of players, giving the film a mild exploitation-of-the-poor undercurrent.
Kayla is a capable female coder and survivor who ultimately seizes power, and her mother is a victim of gendered abuse, but the film offers no explicit feminist thesis.
The film is a straightforward horror-thriller that delivers scares rather than moral instruction, with only a faint closing note about punishing 'the ones who deserve it.'
The protagonist is Black, but the film never engages with race, racism, or racial identity as a theme.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body-positive themes or messaging appear in the film.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a contemporary horror story with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
A cursed text adventure, a broke coder named Kayla, and a prize of $125,000 that no sensible person would claim. Toby Meakins directs his first feature with the grim economy of a man who knows exactly what the budget will and will not permit. This is a British horror picture, which means damp flats, grey weather, and a rent collector called Lance who serves as the closest thing to a thesis the screenplay can assemble.
Kayla is played by Iola Evans, and the casting gives the film a Black lead and a broadly diverse ensemble by the standards of the genre, though the screenplay never treats her race as a subject worth a scene. Her competence as a coder carries a mild current of self-possession. The abuse visited on her mother by Lance gestures toward gendered cruelty and then leaves it there, unorganized into an argument. The exploitation angle is the most legible piece of social observation on offer: Lance trades drugs and shelter for sex, and the game's creator built a fortune on the suffering of players. The film notices that the poor get squeezed. It declines to make a speech about it.
Mostly this is a machine for jump scares, a text parser that eats waitresses and drowns children in public swimming pools. The closing line, where Kayla promises that only the ones who deserve it will suffer next, is the lone moment of moral instruction, and it lands with the subtlety of a cassette rewinding. The rest is a bog-standard horror exercise, forgettable, occasionally nasty, and entirely uninterested in teaching us anything. A modest entry in the ledger. Not much to certify.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In pursuit of an unclaimed $125,000 prize, a broke college dropout decides to play an obscure, 1980s survival computer game. But the game curses her, and she’s faced with dangerous choices and reality-warping challenges. After a series of unexpectedly terrifying moments, she realizes she’s no longer playing for the money but for her life.
Questions about Choose or Die
Is Choose or Die woke?
No — Choose or Die is not especially woke, scoring 26 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Choose or Die have any woke elements?
3 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (50), Eat the Rich (35) and Feminist Agenda (30). On Representation Casting: The lead, Kayla, is played by Black actress Iola Evans, and the cast is notably diverse for a British horror film, though the character's race is never a plot point.
How does Choose or Die compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #69 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.