An extremely serious Truth or Dare (2018) analysis

Truth or Dare is a 2018 horror movie with no pretense of depth. It wants to show you boring, flat characters dying boring, flat deaths and awful CGI that’s somehow supposed to be scary to someone. To its credit, it uncontroversially succeeds in its goals. And, predictably, its thematic structure is no better.

The plot of the movie centers around a group of college friends on a spring break trip who are tricked into joining a cursed game of truth or dare which kills participants who lie or fail to follow through with the dare. As the game progresses, the friends begin to turn on and betray one another.

The protagonist, Olivia, is a social justice advocate in her Senior year of college, whose personality can best be described as “nothing.” The audience first sees Olivia’s altruism when she vlogs about her participation in a Habitat for Humanity project. Throughout the movie, her status as an unusually good and wholesome person is repeatedly emphasized. For instance, when asked whether she would save herself and her friends over the entire country of Mexico, she confidently answers no, despite her friends’ protests.

Alongside this straightforward characterization, there is also a somewhat dissonant theme running through this movie: trust. To be more specific, the movie seems to hold the view that people are fundamentally untrustworthy and, though they may perform goodness, they are always ultimately selfishly motivated. As the plot develops, the characters involved in the cursed game, first introduced as good friends, begin to turn on one another for their own survival. To further reinforce the theme of fundamental human badness, the movie ends with Olivia posting another vlog that forces everyone who watches to also participate in the game, with the implication being that the audience, too, has seen the video and is now playing the game as a result.

Here’s the problem: Olivia is the protagonist. We see events through her eyes. Had she not been the viewpoint character, but still did all the same things, it would have been reasonable to expect the audience to assume she had been performing her goodness like every other character in the movie. But we follow Olivia the entire movie. We know that the good things she does are genuine because we know her thoughts. The movie tacking on this twist, rather than being like a thematically-relevant conclusion to the movie, just ends up feeling lazy and forced, which fits right in with the rest of this dumpster fire.