Countdown (2019) — My take on the movie with spoilers!
PLOT SUMMARY: When Quinn uses an app to predict when she is about to die, she must race against time to save herself .
There is an app for everything. And I mean everything.
Bored? There’s an app for reading books, listening to music, watching movies, and playing games.
Want to sharpen up your vocabulary? There’s an app. Want to count your steps per day. App. How much water do you drink? Your app will calculate for you.
From the time you wake up, whether you took a shower and brushed your teeth or not, to what is your blood pressure and pulse rate, to how many hours of sleep are you getting per day...there’s an app. Imagine it and there will probably be an app for that.
All that is left, is an app that will tell you when you die. Apart from that, your smartphone with countless apps will take care of your every need.
COUNTDOWN Movie Plot
Countdown touches upon the growing addiction of adding apps to your phone. So when a group of teens find there’s an app on the store that tells you when you will die, they jump on it and download it.
Not everyone receives good news. Seventeen-year-old Courtney has only three hours to live from the time she is at the party.
She obsesses over it to the point of getting out of the car of her inebriated boyfriend. Uh oh, she broke the user agreement. What was the user agreement? No one knows. No one reads it. Everyone just wants to get access to the app ASAP.
A wraith-like figure follows Courtney home, but it is too late. The app has reached its last second and she is pulled up and thrown down forcefully.
On the other side, her boyfriend has hit a car and a tree branch spikes through the windshield and through the passenger seat where Courtney was supposed to be sitting.
Her boyfriend is hospitalized and has to undergo surgery. He meets a nurse, Quinn, and tells her about the app.
Quinn is intrigued but doesn’t believe he will die in 19 hours at the operating table.
Minutes before the operation, he makes a detour to the bathroom and uh oh, he has broken the user agreement. Yes, he has kept the phone in the pocket of his gown.
He didn’t try turning off the phone, switching off notifications or simply tossing the phone out the window. No, he’s perfectly fine with walking around with that atrocious app that makes a screeching sound.
He is killed and as he takes his last breath, the countdown stops.
When Quinn finds out what happened, she is certain that the app may be predicting death after all. She downloads it and finds she has only three days. Her superior, Doctor Sullivan is blessed with 39 more years.
Quinn still doesn’t believe it and the videos she finds online is flagged as fake.
She tries deleting the app but finds that she cannot. As she keeps seeing dark figures, she realizes she may be haunted and goes to a phone repair guy who gives her a new phone. The second she turns it on though, the app runs and continues the countdown to her death.
She freaks out and runs out. A guy behind her, Matt follows her and saves her from a guy Quinn hit with her car.
There are no apologies, no information exchanged. He runs off as Quinn tries to make sense of the creepy figure who had clasped her in the car and caused her to panic and hit the car.
Matt confesses he too downloaded the app and has the same time left as Quinn.
They decide to go see the priest at the hospital who is barely any help. Quinn is pulled aside and told she is suspended because she flirted with Dr Sullivan even though it was he who harassed her.
Matt goes to the bathroom and is spooked by his brother’s ghost.
Quinn and Matt leave to see another priest who is fascinated by demons and tells them about a gypsy who predicted someone’s death and how he tried to send his brother to battle. Enraged at being tricked, the demon comes after him and kills him at the exact time the gypsy had predicted his death.
Quinn and Matt go to the phone repair guy and ask him to hack the app. She finds out her sister Jordan downloaded the app as well and has fewer hours than Quinn.
They all change the amount of time left to their death and Quinn takes a picture of the Latin text encoded in the app.
They go back to the priest who translates it for them and reveal that they only have to survive one more second than the intended time of death in order to trick the demon into thinking he doesn’t have to follow the app’s time and that it is all a lie.
On the other side, Jordan is haunted by her mother’s ghost who blames her for getting the information of Quinn’s whereabouts and then rushing off to get her and then getting hit by a drunk.
Quinn arrives in time and takes her with her to the priest when they all find out that the hacking trick didn’t work.
The priest asks them all to stand in the centre of the pentagrams and tells them not to leave.
Of course, Matt does the exact opposite knowing he is being tricked by his guilt as per his previous experiences.
He leaves, is lured outside and gets hit by a car. Pinned to the tree, Matt takes his last breath as the phone app clicks the last second.
Even though the app is evil, the characters make sure they have their phone in their hands at all times.
Jordan is stabbed by something in the library and has to be taken to the hospital.
COUNTDOWN Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Quinn decides to kill Dr Sullivan when another nurse reveals she too was harassed. If she kills the doctor before his time, the curse would be lifted.
Of course, the wraith doesn’t allow it and Quinn decides she must kill herself before her sister in order to save her. She takes a full shot of morphine and dies.
The demon is confused and instantly vanquished.
Jordan is saved and shakes her dead sister only to find her sister had marked out a circle and a message to her sister to inject her with the antidote.
Jordan does that and Quinn is saved.
The next day, the girls are laying out flowers at the grave when Quinn receives a message on her app. Countdown 2.0 is being downloaded.
Elsewhere, the phone repair guy is killed at his date since he tried to con the demon.
This was a cliched, gratuitous ending.
Just how, could the demon have decided to come back? Was it because it realized Quinn was alive? Demons hate being tricked and now everyone has to wait for the sequel to find out for sure.
The movie had an interesting angle but needed to edit out the forced romantic angle and the ending that was too predictable.
Otherwise, a good horror movie that although relies on jump scares, does it right. The horror scenes are scary enough and the movie theme, enough to give you jitters.
Scare scale:
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