We’ve pitched a few ideas to revamp TV shows – introducing a starved Bengal tiger as a surprise contestant to the Big Brother house, transporting the cast of Made in Chelsea to Mogadishu and perhaps most controversially casting actual well known celebrities in ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here!’ – all rejected. But Die before you Die has the best of all ideas – burying them alive for three days with just an air pipe and a small amount of water – better still is that here it is an ‘influencer’ who is buried alive, that group of delusional window lickers that can’t use a biro without getting it on their clothing.
The influencer here is Adi (Ziad Abaza) the sort of bewilderingly arrogant feckless tosspot that documents every moment of their life on social media to their adoring and presumably lobotomized audience. Adi is a married man with a young daughter and yet behaves like a wannabe 13 year old gangster, calling everyone ‘bruv’, ending every sentence with, ‘yeah?’ and that everything is ‘safe’ which he will soon find will be far from the case. Whilst out at a shisha bar he is recognised by Lee (Harry Reid) and quickly and wrongly dubs him a, ‘superfan’ which he obviously is not as he able to string a sentence together and does not have the glazed, vacant look in his eyes of Brooklyn Beckham when asked what he does for a job.
It’s Lee who suggests a challenge that Adi believes will push through the 100k subscribers barrier. The challenge Lee lays down is for Adi to be buried alive claiming to have done it himself and knows who can organise such an event. Desperate for likes and subscribers Adi agrees and drags his friend Maz (Mim Shaikh) along to do it with him and soon introduced to a group of Sufi Muslim elders who tell him that this will be a spiritual reawakening that will see him leave his former life of materialism behind.
Given a light, a digital watch, assured that he will be given water at 7am each morning and dug up after three days the pair readily agree – what could possibly go wrong as they are driven with hoods over their heads to an anonymous field with a large deep hole in the centre.
For anyone who suffers from claustrophobia the initial moments when Adi overrules his rank stupidity to do the challenge is the most uncomfortable scene as he climbs down a ladder and then has to slide himself into a coffin sized space at the side of the hole. Pulling a section of board across the tight space the soil is shovelled on top of him. It is the stuff of nightmares and so begins his turmoil – alone inside what is essentially now an unmarked grave with only a tiny toy money figure his daughter has given him. Pretty quickly the questions inside his head begin. It’s a highly effective technique as the questions arise seemingly from the child’s toy acting almost as an alter ego and answered by him as a voiceover as his paranoia and panic increases when the promised water doesn’t arrive after the first day and three days comes and quickly goes and he has not been dug out.
Directed by Dan Pringle, whose previous was the under rated ‘K-Shop’ this continues his interest in dark themes and the buried alive scenario is a popular one. From Kill Bill 2 to the Ryan Reynolds starrer, ‘Buried’ this is initially almost unbearably claustrophobic but any sense of this is quickly dissipated when the film frequently leaves the confines of Adi in his hole. It doesn’t help either that Adi is a hugely unsympathetic character and his situation is likely to be wish fulfilment for audiences tired of these talent vacuums parading themselves on social media as people with aspirational lifestyles which they’ve usually blagged rather than worked for meaning that should he escape it will be a bitter disappointment for audiences cheering on the soil around him. What does work in its favour is the very ending of the film that works extremely well and confirms what we all think of influencers.
related feature: ‘K-Shop’ kebab shop killer movie reviewed here
related feature : Natalie Burn talks chainsaws, action & small people in her new film, ‘Til Death Do Us Part!’
Here’s the Die before you die trailer……
