It doesn’t matter how good or bad the movie turns out to be; any self-respecting horror with a central premise that’s either intriguing, engaging, unique, or any combination of the three will undoubtedly find major success at the box office in spite of a critical drubbing, as 2019’s Countdown knows all too well.
Made for a thrifty $6.5 million, writer and director Justin Dec’s time-tampering supernatural chiller recouped those production costs eight times over during its theatrical run, laughing in the face of a 26 percent Rotten Tomatoes score that’s admittedly roughly par for the course for low budget nightmares.
Elizabeth Lail stars as a nurse who downloads an app that predicts exactly when somebody is going to die, which we can safely assume isn’t available on the App Store. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for her newfangled installation to inform her that she’s only got three days left on the mortal plane, plunging her into a desperate race against time to secure her own survival, all while a ghostly figure haunts her everywhere she goes.
By no means a classic, Countdown doesn’t come close to maximizing the undoubted potential of its fascinating hook, although a substantially higher Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 72 percent does at the very least indicate it ticked all the boxes the target demographic was hoping to see checked off.
Even now, Netflix subscribers have found themselves drawn into the pulse-pounding battle against the forces of time and terror, with FlixPatrol naming Countdown as one of the biggest hits the streaming service has to offer around the world.