Would You Rather (2013)

Would You Rather arrives from 2012 with the grim efficiency of a party game nobody wanted to attend. Iris needs money for her brother's leukemia treatment, a philanthropist named Shepard Lambrick offers a dinner invitation, and the evening descends into electric shocks, ice picks, and a barrel of water. The film is lean, mean, and entirely uninterested in explaining itself. It kills its characters quickly and moves on, which is its one genuine virtue.

The class resentment here is real but unexamined. Shepard is an aristocrat who purchases the suffering of the desperate for sport, and the film clearly enjoys watching him do it. That is a rich-versus-poor predation streak, though it functions as a horror staple, not an argument. The cast includes a few Black performers in the ensemble, present and unremarked upon, which is exactly how it should be and also exactly why it registers so faintly. Iris proves resourceful under pressure, stabbing her would-be rapist in the leg with an ice pick, but the assault plays as a stock beat of the genre. No thesis accompanies it.

A paralyzed elderly woman exists mostly so that an ice pick can find her artery. Nobody pauses to deliver a moral. The film is too busy drowning people to lecture anyone about anything, and the absence of a sermon is a relief. Instead we get ninety minutes of escalating cruelty that ends with a young woman shooting her last opponent and going home to discover her brother has overdosed anyway. The nihilism is honest. The social commentary is not present, and the film does not pretend otherwise. It is a nasty little chamber piece, and it knows it.