There are many things no one should ever do in a horror movie if they want to survive. For example, running or hiding from a killer, play haunted videotapes, and the list goes on and on but imagine this, you randomly scroll through your phone and find this app that says this is when you are going to die exactly. Films like “Jexi,” “Cell,” and “Unfriended” about evil apps aren’t new today. Just keep this in mind; movie houses won’t stop making these types of movies. Known as a “killer app movie,” directed by Justin Dec, “Countdown” was released in theaters on Oct. 25. It is just another cheap thriller you should avoid. It is a waste of time.

The movie opens up with a college party when six kids stumble across this app called Countdown. They all download the app and one girl (Anne Winters) only has 3 hours to live. She tries to avoid any dangerous situation especially getting in the car with her drunk boyfriend (Dillon Lane) but hours later, things take a sharp turn when she suspiciously dies. Meanwhile, at a hospital, a new nurse, Quinn Hariss (Elizabeth Lail), encounters a patient who was the drunk boyfriend of the girl who suspiciously died that night. He had told Quinn the app is not fake and he only had 19 hours to live and suspects he will die during surgery. Quinn has her doubts about this app but later when a group of nurses downloads it, Quinn feels obligated to download the app as well. The app tells her she had less than three days to live but when the boy suddenly dies, she was unable to remove the app from her phone and slowly started to believe that this might be real. She soon realizes her younger sister, Jordan (Talitha Bateman) is in grave danger and as soon she meets a boy named Matt (Jordan Calloway) who also is in the same situation. They visit a priest (P.J. Byrne) who specializes in demon studies to see if they can reverse this countdown. 

“Countdown” is your typical horror movie with flickering lights, shadows, appearances, many jump scares, and it definitely had a bunch of cheap jump scare moments. While I did like some of the jump scares, others were expected which didn’t make it as scary as I personally wanted it to be and the sisterly relationship between Jordan and Quinn didn’t feel real. It felt forced and had no emotion. If the app wasn’t present between those two then I don’t think that they would be talking at all; it showed that they had a really messy relationship during the movie and Jordan didn’t want to talk to Quinn because of their mother and it just felt as if they were forced to love each other because of the app. Also, Matt’s character was just there. They introduced him to the storyline and already he is a main character? Like even his relationship Quinn, it was just there and rushed. They knew each other for a day and already fell in love with each other? I mean Matt’s character had no presence to the storyline and there were probably other people in the movie that were struggling with the same thing with the app. To some this part up in one sentence, there was no character development. 

To be honest, I wouldn’t waste your time with this movie. It’s just 90 minutes of no character development, fake love, and okay scares. From the trailer, it looked decent. There was a direct storyline with character development, and many good jump scares but the movie just did not meet these expectations at all. I would overall rate this movie a 5/10.