Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Dan Pringle
Starring: Ziad Abaza, Mim Shaikh, Priya Blackburn, Harry Reid
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.
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 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.
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.
