I watched an interactive film where the audience decide the ending – and here‘s what happened

In an era of deepfakes and AI slop, sci-fi dystopias like Black Mirror come across more like science than fiction. Phone addiction is also peaking to the point where streaming services are purposely dumbing down content for audiences to watch while doom-scrolling their Insta feed to saturation.

Watching films inside the cinema seems like the only option for a viewing experience devoid of any notifications. But then again, it’s not like cinema attendance has been skyrocketing since the pandemic.

Enter British filmmaker Paul Raschid and the folk at London’s indie movie haunt Genesis Cinema as they try to subvert traditional moviegoing with glowsticks, multiple endings, and a hall full of audience members bickering over whether a jogger should go left or right.

Inevitably, it calls Black Mirror’s interactive ‘Bandersnatch’ episode to mind. Offering Netflix audiences multiple options to play around with its narrative, the Netflix special followed the same concept as numerous choice-based games before it, as well as the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books from even earlier.

Raschid himself isn’t new to the interactive space, with Genesis also having screened his previous interactive films like The Gallery and Hello Stranger, both of which can now be played on Android, PlayStation and the like. The Run is also available to play as an interactive film-game hybrid on your phone, but there’s something about experiencing it in a crowded cinema that makes it all the more chaotic and fun.

Having died and ‘respawned’ multiple times in Bandersnatch, I dropped by the cinema with bare-minimum expectations. But an eyebrow did raise when the cinema staff began handing out glowsticks to the audience: a mixed bag of date night couples, cinephile loners, and 40-somethings clutching onto their sauvignon blancs in crinkly plastic cups.

As the lights went dim and an aerial shot sets up the Italian forest setting, we were instructed to crack our glowsticks and keep them ready for when the film paused at crucial junctures. Confronted by two decisions at every such ‘checkpoint’, an emcee would ask the moviegoers to raise their glowsticks in favour of each choice. The decision drawing the most glowsticks would determine our road ahead, even if it often led to our heroine dying.

The last time I raised my arm to make my voice heard was perhaps in high school, but unlike high school, I had a raver’s glowworm clasped within my fingers this time. Also, the emcee wasn’t a headmaster demanding pin-drop silence. The audience were rather encouraged to yell and cackle to make a case for their choices.

Here’s a primer. The film opens with our fitness influencer heroine Zanna (Roxanne McKee) waking up in the Italian countryside next to a bearded farmer named Matteo (George Blagden). While Matteo seems to be talking sweetly to Zanna, we the people are asked to choose whether Zanna deserves to be ‘honest’ or ‘kind’. The audience, ruthlessly craving for some tea-spilling drama, raised their fists in favour of being brutally blunt. And so, the emcee pressed play, and Zanna delivered her disinterest in stretching this hookup into romcom territory.

Meanwhile, a slightly older and seemingly courteous lady seated to my right seemed to draw a long face. Poor lady wanted her protagonist not to be so fiery-tongued. But as Zanna laced up her shoes and embarked on the titular run, the choices became harder with life or death at stake. When Zanna found herself in the company of suspicious locals, it took me some time to decide if my glowstick should motion towards negotiating with them or attacking them with a bubbling pot of hot water nearby.

Impulsive decisions don’t always yield the best results in The Run

My once-kind-hearted neighbour was gearing more towards violence this time, eyeing the majority who were eagerly craving some bloodlust. Alas, impulsive decisions don’t always yield the best results in The Run, and we had to revert back to Zenna’s POV from the last saved checkpoint.

Over an hour later, the lady on the right and I succumbed to peer pressure, raising our dimming glowsticks towards any choice that drew the most responses, not caring a bit about our ill-fated influencer. Once masked attackers chase you with knives, guns, and machetes in the wild, you can’t really calculate your moves. More so when you’re left with choices like ‘Attack High’ or ‘Attack Low’.

But that’s when The Run yielded its most exhilarating moments for me. Playing an interactive journey with chess-like introspection is more achievable when you’re alone, but sometimes, you need the unpredictability of a card game. And when a couple of passionate participants yell ‘high’ or ‘low’ in unison, even the worst decisions start feeling comforting. Yes, I might be killing off my heroine, but at least I’m not solely responsible. 

It might seem like I’m giving away too much, but these snippets are just among hundreds of decisions that Raschid’s free-flowing story allows. A particularly biblical end to the journey left me with a mixed taste around an hour and a half later, only for me to be greeted with a map that showed my progress so far. Turns out some other turns on the road could have led me to some twenty other possible endings. It was time to go home, but the curiosity to explore the other paths still lingers in my head.

On the surface, the words ‘interactive film’ in a cinema might seem like an unnecessary gimmick along the lines of scented scratch cards in a 4D film. But other than drawing a map of multiple possibilities with a Sherlockian mindset, Raschid and co are simply celebrating a communal sense of movie-watching.

As a cinema-lover among the ranks of ‘Nicole Kidman in AMC ads’, I occasionally crave a crowd-pleaser where I can join some strangers in laughing and crying together (instead of being shushed by a snobby Letterboxd-er for crinkling open a packet of crisps).

With its awkward pauses and high-decibel debates over character choices, The Run offered me a sense of communal film watching that might not be perfect but is still thoroughly engaging.

This isn’t a gimmick, it’s a film movement

And even if you look at the film without the interactivity, Zanna’s tumultuous running trail yields some absurdly funny jump scares and some grimly sadistic visuals. The acting might be slightly wooden and the dialogue a bit clunky and heavy on exposition, but The Run truly makes for perfect midnight screening material. Eagle-eyed fans of Italian genre cinema might even be able to spot giallo maestro Dario Argento and the original Django actor Franco Nero.

With hardly any interactive films receiving such month-long residencies, it’s hard to predict if this is the future of movies. When I meet Raschid later, he doesn’t sell me The Run as the future but more as a worthy accompaniment to conventional cinema in these streaming-heavy, post-pandemic times.

The format truly allows for some seemingly democratic decision-making, even if the verdict arises from an anarchic cacophony. But for Raschid, it’s this freedom to do the right thing or mess it all up that flips the script.

‘I think one of the reasons why people enjoy video games or short-form content on social media is that it gives them a degree of agency,’ says Raschid, recalling the rowdy crowds at his film’s screenings with a smile. ‘If we can take that agency and use it as a storytelling device in something that is also a traditional cinematic story, I think it’s a positive alternative to bring more audience members back into the cinemas.’

One might wonder if Raschid’s rush to lure in new audiences in a dark room is what Georges Méliès felt a century ago while crash-landing a space capsule into the eye of the Moon, or what the Lumière Brothers achieved by scaring audiences with the ‘arrival of a train’. ‘I think being welcoming and open-minded to alternative formats of storytelling will only make the space flourish more at a time where it's, you know, it's very much on the decline.’ Raschid adds before breaking into a snappier, advertorial line. ‘This isn’t a gimmick, it’s a film movement.’

As I walk out of Genesis, I’m told that The Run also screens at the cinema bar upstairs once a week. While I don’t usually advocate making drunken decisions with strangers, I’m tempted to make an exception this time.

The Run screens at Genesis Cinema until December 31. Book tickets here.