Netflix’s Choose Or Die Ending Explained- Karma, Phreaking, And Does Kayla Win?

Equal parts Stay Alive and Brainscan, Choose Or Die is a nasty little remix of demonic online game morality.

There are a ton of video games movies out there. Some are better than others. Some are plotted versions of video game franchises, as in the Silent Hill and Resident Evil films, and then some feature a world where the game invades real life. The vast majority of those, including Gamer and How To Make A Monster are not great. Choose Or Die travels down that same well-trod path with mixed results.

Written by Simon Allen, Matthew James Wilkinson, and Toby Meakins, who also directs, Choose Or Die doesn’t bring anything particularly new to the table. Still, it does employ some inventive gags(pun intended) and a likable hero.

Kayla, The 100’s Iola Evans gets inadvertently sucked into a diabolical game of hurt or be hurt when her friend Isaac(Asa Butterfield) introduces her to an ’80s era online game with a rumored unclaimed prize. Her mother is a drug addict, and she is a gifted but unemployable coder because she dropped out of school. The money could mean a chance to give Kayla and her mother a fresh start. Unfortunately, the cursed game forces her to choose between impossible outcomes. She either saves herself and someone else pays the price, or she dies. Whether she reaches the end and outwits the demon is open for debate. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Choose or Die.

Were there video games with cash prizes?

There really were rumored game competitions like this, but most of them were myths only. Rolling Stones magazine in 1972, was the first to award a prize for a video game. The winner of the game Spacewar won a year’s subscription to the magazine. In 1980 players competed to have the highest score on Space Invaders. Those two competitions were the precursors of ESports today. Despite a complete lack of proof back in the ’80s and early ’90s, everybody knew a friend of a friend who swore cash prize games were real and hidden in remote corners of the internet that only hackers knew how to access.

Were there really tones embedded in computer code?

The tones Isaac uses to trace the game back to Beck are a real thing that early hackers did. Phreakers, as they were known in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, cheated the system by playing certain tones that tricked the phone system into allowing long-distance phone calls for free. Before cell phones, long-distance calls, even between states, were very expensive. Famous phreakers include Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

As time went on, these tones could be used to hack into lots of places and pirate software and cheats from the BBS, similar to a subreddit or Dischord channel today. Although War Games famously tried to scare many an ambitious young hacker with its nuclear war threat, only the truly elite could get inside government systems. That doesn’t mean some haven’t been successful, though. For example, in 2021, two young hackers were able to infiltrate the DoD using skill, persistence, and good luck.

Choose Or Die Ending

After Isaac used what we old school gamers remember as the modem tone hack, he is able to track the game’s creator to an old warehouse. Kayla and Isaac find the deserted warehouse and a VHS tape. The game’s creator was a man named Beck(Joe Bolland). After watching the tape, they learn that he and his fellow designers developed CURS>R embedding symbols that curse the player and reward the creator with power and wealth. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more the gamemaster hurts gamers, the more they are rewarded. In the video, Beck demonstrates how when he hurts others; he is healed.

The game is not done with them, and despite thinking they have cracked the code, Beck forces Kayla to choose to rewind or fast forward Isaac within the game. Beck punishes them for cheating using the tone hack. A glitchy sequence of disgusting tape eating later, Isaac is dead, leaving Kayla to figure things out on her own. This leads to a showdown with the Boss. She either defeats him or dies trying.

Does Kayla survive Choose Or Die?

In the final game, Kayla finds Hal(Eddie Marsan) from the beginning of the film who started this chain of events. Copy creation is part of the cycle to seed the world with new gamers. Hal was promised his family would be left alone(for now) if he made those copies. The irony is Hal thinks he should be the hero, not the evil boss. He may have started out wanting to protect his family, but the game destroyed anything good in him until he was a monster who abused his wife and child while enjoying all the wealth and power the game provided him.

The two battle it out. The more each hurts themselves, the more the other is injured. Complicating things are Hal’s tortured wife and child, who help each of the players independently. Finally, Kayla drowns herself in the pool, and Hal dies, freeing his wife and son. Now she is in charge of the game, and she realizes the more she makes others suffer, the more things are fixed in her own life.

She chooses to curse her mother’s drug dealer first by forcing him to faceplant into a pile of needles. Later, when Beck contacts her, she says she will only force those who deserve to be punished to play. Those who came before her were unable or unwilling to resist the urge to benefit themselves solely, though. She has won the ultimate vigilante game where she could now have the power to change the world, assuming the rules don’t vary. Will she use the power for good, or will she be corrupted by the ability to shape the world around her remains to be seen, but karma seldom likes other’s doing her job. Everything has a price, and Kayla may start out wanting to save the world, but absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of our intentions.