Countdown

Countdown follows nursing student Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail) as she installs an app that reveals the user’s date of death, with Quinn forced to take drastic measures after said app declares that she’ll be dead within two days. It’s a pretty nifty premise that is, at the outset, employed to agreeable and entertaining effect by first-time filmmaker Justin Dec, as Countdown kicks off with a decidedly engrossing pre-credits sequence and better-than-expected opening half hour – with the affable atmosphere heightened by Lail’s personable, sympathetic turn as the central character. It’s clear, then, that Countdown slowly-but-surely loses its grip on the viewer as it segues into a predictably erratic midsection, as Dec delivers a second act rife with silly jump scares and a tedious emphasis on blahs investigation into the haunted app (with the somewhat tedious nature of this stretch compounded by a disastrous lack of Final Destination-like kills). The repetitive, uninvolving vibe is certainly not helped by an ongoing inclusion of bizarre asides and tangents, with the most obvious example of this a seriously strange “me too” subplot that doesn’t pay off until the very end. And while that climax is admittedly fairly decent (and impressively unexpected), Countdown has long-since confirmed its place as a prototypically uneven teen-friendly horror flick.

** out of ****