The Movie Waffler New to VOD - DIE BEFORE YOU DIE | The Movie Waffler

New to VOD - DIE BEFORE YOU DIE

DIE BEFORE YOU DIE review
An influencer is trapped six feet underground when an online challenge goes wrong.

Review by Benjamin Poole

Directed by: Dan Pringle

Starring: Ziad Abaza, Mim Shaikh, Priya Blackburn, Harry Reid

Die Before You Die poster

Fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of influencer/YouTube culture; arriving as suddenly as a blown bubble and popping with similarly pitiless alacrity: a bracingly modern phenomena. What a time to be alive, when the most prominent media d'jour is at the same time also its most emptily old fashioned, due to everything moving so fast. You'd have to have a heart of stone to not enjoy the downfall of the world's most prominent YouTuber, MrBeast (look, I don't make the rules: our provoked narrative instincts demand a rise and fall trajectory. If you can't handle us at our most cynical then don't seek our clout when we're at our most bored). Influencer reach is reduced, while the top down marketing which profits the influencer is no longer feasible because the perceived corporate puppets are not "trusted." Apparently, consumers are more likely to interact with each other, rather than subscribe to a culture denominated by a verb which implies complete and unthinking passivity. Pity the Internet Personality, selling their image and life to diminishing returns, pushed to, in the same manner as an increasingly degraded sex worker in some ridiculously orthodox melodrama (like, I dunno, the finger-wagging Requiem for a Dream), perform ridiculous and yet more extreme stunts for the kudos. Within the aggravated ecology of content creation, it's a few short cycles from the Paul brothers and their show fights for the gullible to Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People.

Die Before You Die review

Enter Adi, content creator and central character of Dan Pringle's Die Before You Die (scripting duties shared with Ziad Abaza, who also enjoys star billing). Handsome, charismatic and slightly absurd, Adi is recognisable as an internet personality. He speaks in that slightly forced patter that these people deploy with confused irony and adopts a haunted enthusiasm when the ring light is on (writing that line about slang reminded me of Bo Burnham's wonderful and seemingly forgotten Eighth Grade: both the last and the first word on this very topic). Adi is in danger of losing subscribers in the highly competitive content climate and is furthermore being roasted by a rival influencer for his declining status. Adi lives to serve his channel and need for online glory, and so it is a twist of poetic irony when the opportunity for Adi to be buried for three days is presented.


Pringle and Abaza present their protagonist as sympathetically pathetic (after all, the internet personality is the logical terminus of anyone who has ever engaged in social media). As he pursues his career/hobby with similarly juvenile producer Maz (Mim Shaikh), Adi's wife is patient while his young daughter is overlooked. The hollow lot is essayed with scepticism, reassuring our suspicions that behind the phone camera the experience is as joyless as we'd hope it would be. We get the feeling that Adi needs a wake-up call... And so it comes to pass that Adi is buried alive, in a lonely grave and the most unlikely of circumstances, in order to win some likes.

Die Before You Die review

Die Before You Die takes a jaundiced view of internet stunt practice, with the perpetrators of Adi's interment being literally the shadiest bunch you could imagine who enact the shiftiest procedure possible (and led by Harry Reid, who used to play Ben Mitchell in Eastenders, a meta reference in this resolutely British film). Driven for miles blindfolded, Adi is placed in a hole in a remote field, with his only comforts a torch and a thin air pipe to the world above. No food, and no phones (this last, essential plot detail does stretch credulity, but otherwise Adi's compliance is in keeping with the numerous YouTubers who have pointlessly lost their lives executing stunts - I was going to link but it's too upsetting and ghoulish). The inherent challenge of making a man in a box interesting for a majority running time is easily matched by Abaza's watchability and Pringle's storytelling. The claustrophobia is deliciously uncomfortable, and Adi's psychosis is communicated by a voiceover in which he internalises his internet persona as an antagonistic frenemy.

Die Before You Die review

The pleasing cinematic craft of Die Before You Die backs up the film's scorn of new media, wherein Adi, convinced that the gig is fool proof because his followers will surely notice if he goes offline, slowly grasps that no one gives a fuck in a realisation which culminates in a genuinely startling sequence detailing a time lapse death and indifferent afterlife. And if the spiritual conclusion of Die Before Your Die, with its chiding ideologies, comes across as conservative and po-faced, then, just as we are encouraged to look at ourselves in the black mirror, in the film's final moments, the reflection winks back. A neat twist which is characteristic of this entertaining and inventive movie.
[EDIT] It turns out that I was sent a screener with no subtitles, which meant that I was not privy to the conversation which Adi has with Imams. This sequence is vital to the film as it signposts the devout themes of Die Before You Die, with the men suggesting that Adi feels he is the exception to death, and that the process is symbolic. Adi's false consciousness must die before he can achieve his true spiritual nature. This element imbues the eventual outcome with an especial poignancy not available to me on first viewing, and changes my reading of the characters who Adi is involved with.

Die Before You Die is on UK/ROI VOD now.



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