Countdown is the inevitable horror film about an app called Countdown that can accurately count down the exact seconds until your death. A race against a literal life clock brings the age-old question back to the forefront: if you knew when you were going to die, would you be able to stop it from happening, thereby cheating death?
Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail) is a young nurse who downloads an app called Countdown, and unexpectedly discovers that she only has three days left to live. In good health and with no known possibilities of why, or how she might die, she decides to use her last few days on earth attempting to figure out how the app knows she is going to die, so that she can try to avoid death when it's her time.
After unsuccessfully trying to do the obvious and delete the app, Quinn discovers there are actual demons who come to scare the tar out of anyone who tries to break the terms and conditions. These supernatural elements occur well before a character tries to cheat their time of death, although it makes for some good scares.
Fortunately, Quinn finds some help at the phone store, forming a bond with a handsome young man named Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway). But then they set off together on their doomed romantic adventure with the highest of hopes and lowest of IQs.
The other male characters in this film are chauvinistic for the most part, bordering on predators. While social justice doesn't really fit into Countdown, its existence gives motivation to the main character and adds more mainstream appeal to the film overall.
The most compelling scares arise from the creepy visage of death itself, the specter almost visibly waiting in the shadows to take lives when the timer is up. The demons all provide a good, thorough haunting in all the most sacred of places, but the hooded death character is about the only subtle element of the film.
In his feature debut, Justin Dec writes and directs a film that taps into what horror genre fans crave, delivering more of the same type of PG-13 thrills that have captivated audience dollars over many years. He inserts scare scenes and obnoxious music, twists the plot, and then tries to deliver that payoff. It's a tried-and-true formula that can be hard to stick to while still possessing artistic merit. Fortunately, artistic merit is not what movies like this are going for, so it unashamedly ticks all the boxes without delivering anything extra.
What Countdown delivers, often both unintentionally and unexpectedly, is comedy. The dialogue borders on laughably bad, despite some newcomer talent. There are also some nice one-liners, insults, and comedic situations that are designed to make the audience laugh.
Ultimately, Countdown is fun and forgettable fluff that could be watchable with a packed audience cheering it on, or a lazy late-night watch to help quiet any serious thoughts. Enough laughs abound to slog through the plot, and the scares are abundant and well-paced, albeit tame.