Would You Rather (2012) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 2

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You can choose to read this article now, or shove a red hot poker in your eye. Your choice.

Would You Rather creates a series of impossible choices for characters that are at the end of their ropes. These choices are dangled in front of them by a rich man for his own sadistic pleasure, and maybe the audiences as well.

Before Viewing

The trailer for Would You Rather shows a young woman with a sick brother visiting a doctor who can help her. He invites her to his estate for a dinner party and…a game. This game involves a twisted version of Would You Rather that involves characters punishing each other (or themselves) in sadistic ways for the doctor’s amusement. Sounds like he needs to get a different hobby!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Somewhere in New York state, Iris (Brittany Snow) lives with her brother Raleigh (Logan Miller) who was injured in a car accident that killed their parents. He is in need of a bone marrow transplant, but they don’t have enough money to afford the medical bills. A meeting with Raleigh’s oncologist, Dr. Barden (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), presents an offer from philanthropist Shepard Lambrick (Jeffery Combs) to provide the necessary funds and treatments by attending a dinner to play a game. Iris is unsure, but after talking with her brother again, she decides she would do anything for him.

At the Lambrick mansion, Iris joins seven other players for a dinner with Shepard and his son Julian (Robin Lord Taylor). They are served by Bevans (Jonny Coyne) who is later revealed to have been in MI-5. After tempting Iris and Conway (John Heard) with sums of money to do things against their beliefs and best interests, Shepard offers them one final chance to leave, before starting the game in earnest. The game will be an intense version of Would You Rather where the choices offered the people might have deadly consequences.

The first round consists of a player choosing to shock themselves or the person seated next to them. Conway wants no part of this and gets up to leave. Bevins abruptly shoots him in the head, while Shepard reminds them they are all here to play. All the players play, with half choosing to shock themselves before Round 1 ends. Meanwhile, Dr. Barden, uncomfortable with the fact that he recommended Iris to Shepard, pulls a gun out of his drawer and drives to the mansion. Between rounds, Julian taunts and heckles the players, calling them pigs, eventually singling out Travis (Charlie Hofheimer), a veteran.

Round 2 offers the players a choice of stabbing the person next to them in the leg with an ice pick, or whipping Travis three times with a sjambok stick. Iris and Lucas (Enver Gjokaj) both choose to whip Travis who claims he can take it. Peter (Robb Wells), a gambler, chooses to stab Linda (June Squibb), an elderly woman whose legs are paralyzed. He stabs too deep and Linda bleeds out and dies. Amy (Sasha Grey), an acerbic young woman, decides to stab Iris, while Cal (Eddie Steeples) decides to beat Travis a final time.

Travis is removed from the game, supposedly dying from his wounds. Iris uses this distraction to escape the room by stabbing a guard with the ice pick and fleeing. Cal heads for Shepard, but the host shoots him dead. Iris hides in the cellar where Dr. Barden finds her. He says he’s here to save her, but is shot in the head by Bevans. Iris is returned to the game. Round 3 has the four final players choose between being held underwater for two minutes or the mystery contents of an envelope. Peter takes the envelope, which requires him to hold a quarter stick of dynamite in his hand. It blows his hand off and he dies of a heart attack.

Lucas also chooses the envelope which forces him to cut his eye with a razor blade. Iris decides to take the water challenge and makes it, barely. Amy challenges the envelope, which tells her she must be held under water for four minutes. She unfortunately drowns. The final challenge is for Iris to shoot Lucas or allow him to live, but receive nothing. She decides to kill the man, disgusted at her fate. Shepard provides her with the promised money and instructions about a bone marrow transplant and sends her home. After she showers up, she checks on her brother but finds that he has committed suicide while she was gone. “What did you do,” she screams.

“When all of you were deciding whether or not to accept our invitation to play the game, you were, in essence, making a choice between the known and the unknown.” – Shepard Lambrick

Consequences of our decisions are a natural part of life. Would You Rather takes apparently innocuous choices and creates a worst case scenario for the characters involved. The film involves itself with the lives of characters that are both desperate and out of options. Iris, who has no job, no savings, and is trying to figure out a way to get her brother a life saving bone marrow transplant, is approached by Shepard Lambrick with an offer that seems too good to be true. His pitch is made to people that cannot afford to say “no” to someone that offers them money in exchange for dinner and a game. They are not in a place, and maybe no one would be, to ask more questions about the event. Certainly, they are not being invited to some sadistic torture party, right?

Would You Rather has two main themes. The first is cruelty and privilege that the Lambricks have towards everyone else. It seems to typify the perception of many one-percenters as above everyone else, thinking that their money makes them superior and able to boss around people of lesser status. Shepard’s power over these eight other individuals begins as a financial power. That’s what gets them in the door to his mansion. His money teases them long enough to stay, with their curiosity allowing them to see the evening as a harmless dinner. But his real power is soon on display as Conway tries to leave and Bevins shoots him dead. Shepard creates a power imbalance where, to him, he offers the individual choices. But due to the disparity of equity between the participants, they end up having no choice at all. Do they want to die by their hand, or his? That becomes the question.

Shepard wants to feel validated by the process, however. After all, he is helping these poor unfortunate people out of their miserable lives (or so he may rationalize it). From his standpoint, all the characters are better off than when they started. The losers are dead, and thus free of their burdens. The winner is richer and able to care for themselves (and possibly even under the thumb of Lambrick Foundation for future game nights). In the end, when the inevitable winner is crowned, Shepard reminds Iris to say “thank you.” Thank you for putting me through this horrendous and debasing game. Thank you for allowing me to sink into a state of being that most people would run from, having known the choice in the first place. Thank you for rigging the game, so that no matter who wins, everybody loses.

His son, Julian, is an example of the worst sort of offspring of the rich and powerful. Having grown up in this lifestyle, his privilege is even more entitled than his father. While Shepard plays the game very matter of factly, taking small pleasure in the events, Julian is cruel and vindictive. He teases, cajoles, and punishes individuals that don’t fully understand the playing field. He attempts to take that which is not his, due to his privilege. His attempt to rape Iris is punished first by Iris stabbing him. But then later with Shepard “talking to him.” Julian is never seen or heard from again in the film. It’s possible that his father taught him a lesson about taking too many liberties with their guests, but the audience is left to make up their own mind.

The second theme is the characters deciding how far they would go against their morals and convictions. Shepard debases two characters very quickly at the start of the evening. He offers Iris, a devout vegetarian, $10,000 to eat the meat on her plate. Thinking this is part of the game, she rather quickly dismisses her lifestyle and consumes the meat. He then offers Conway a similar challenge to drink a glass of wine. Knowing that the older man is a 16 year recovering alcoholic, Shepard raises the stakes to $50,000 in exchange for consuming the entire decanter of Scotch. Desperate, Conway drains the bottle dry. Only after their meal do the characters realize that they haven’t even begun to play.

Shepard couches the game as an experiment to see how the individuals perform under duress. Will their character survive a battle with ethics and reason when their lives are on the line? Just how far will someone go? He puts them into an immediate fight or flight situation. While players like Amy immediately realize the stakes and begin to play the game looking out for herself, Cal, Iris, and Lucas–who bonded a bit before dinner, believe that by sticking together they can win together or somehow outsmart the billionaire and his guards. By the end of the night, Iris realizes that when it comes down to her or Lucas, she can really only look out for herself. She doesn’t even let Lucas tell his sad story to her, dispatching him before he can finish his speech. But like any great tragedy, Iris must come to grips with the dark places she has visited after she arrives home to realize that her choices were for naught. With Raleigh having committed suicide, all hopes for her rationalization of the evenings events vanish.

Would You Rather tries to caution audiences that the choices we make are our responsibility. You cannot take a deal that seems too good to be true and then complain about the fine print. Shepard states at one point that “like in life, there are no do-overs.” Once the wheels are set in motion, there’s no turning this particular car around. The characters in this film, and their eventual loss, are a product of their choices and there’s no going back. But maybe the choices aren’t fair. That happens sometimes. Some choices are between something good and something bad. But there will be other times that the choices are between two bad things. Each person must then make a decision about the proverbial lesser of two evils. The film really seems to shine a light on that aspect.

I would highly recommend this film, as it asks each viewer, “how far would you go into the darkness of your soul?” The audience sees the outcomes of the decisions long before the characters, which creates a tension filled film that lives up to the genre of horror and suspense quite applicably. It might be considered Saw-light to some, as it does fit into the category of torture porn. But the overtones of classism, and the audience’s identification with Iris and her honest struggle creates something stronger than many other films that feature gratuitous violence.

Assorted Musings

• Jeffrey Combs is better known as Dr Herbert West from the Re-Animator series of films, while Brittany Snow made a mark for herself as Chloe Beale in the Pitch Perfect franchise, and will show up later this month in X, a horrific film from A24 Studios.
• Robin Lord Taylor also plays another entitled and terrible offspring as Oswald Cobblepot in the TV series Gotham.
• The background music being played when Iris enters the Lambrick mansion is “Midnight, the Stars and You” by Al Bowlly, most famous for its use in the end sequence of The Shining.