Countdown (4 Stars)

This was my first visit to the cinema since I saw "Ip Man 4" on 10th March. That's three and a half months without going to the cinema, my longest time of abstention since 2012, "Amazing Spider-Man" (21st July 2012) to "The Hobbit" (19th December 2012). I wasn't a regular cinema visitor back then. I didn't start to go to the cinema regularly until I joined Mike McAuley's film group in February 2013.

This is a very good horror film about a smartphone app called Countdown. When you download the app it tells you how long you have left to live, to the exact second. Would you like to know when you die? I would. It would give me time to prepare myself for my death, deleting anything from my computer that I don't want people to find. If I know I have another 24 years I can live recklessly, taking risks, knowing that nothing can kill me. Or is that breaking the app's user agreement?

Nobody ever reads the user agreement when they download software. I don't. Do you? I just click the box that says that I've read and accept the Terms Of Service, etc. My click is legally binding, but I'm stupid enough to trust that there's nothing in the TOS that would be negative.

One of the conditions in the Countdown app's user agreement is that you're not allowed to make any decisions in your life based on the app's prediction. That would mean that my reckless living would break the user agreement. We see a similar case in the film. The teenager Courtney has been told that she only has 19 minutes left to live, so she refuses to let her drunk boyfriend give her a lift home. In my opinion, that's good sense; she should have refused anyway. She dies anyway, but at the hands of a demon.

The demon is Ozhin, someone who's gone with the times. In past centuries he persecuted political leaders, but now he attacks kids with mobile phones in their pockets. In general I don't like films about demons and demon possession, because the demon seems to be able to do just about anything. "Countdown" is an exception. As long as you can accept the premise of a demon using a smartphone app, everything else is logical and makes sense.

Cinemas have been reopened in Germany earlier than in England. Is that a mistake? I honestly don't know. I'm no expert, and even the ones who claim to be experts don't agree with one another. The cinema I visited today, Cinemaxx, has signs hanging up which announce, "The world has changed. So have we". I fear that even after the Coronavirus has been defeated there will be negative effects on the film industry. Television didn't kill cinemas, video tapes didn't kill cinemas, and streaming didn't kill cinemas, but the Coronavirus may yet kill cinemas. As I wrote in my review of "Fractured", Stuttgart's largest cinema, UFA-Palast, has gone bankrupt because of the Coronavirus. Cinemaxx is the second largest, and it's obvious that it's suffering. The ticket prices have been reduced to 4.99 Euros ($5.60 in America, £4.50 in England), but even at this price there were only three of us watching the film.

Going to the cinema isn't just about watching a film on a big screen. It's about socialising, sitting with your friends and chatting about the film afterwards. I fear this aspect of cinema visits will disappear forever.

To finish on a light-hearted note: while I was waiting for a tram after watching the film, I downloaded the Countdown app from the Google Play Store. It said I only had nine hours to live. That's a screenshot from my phone at the top of this post, made a few minutes after I installed the app. Let's see if I live until tomorrow.