Here is the trap a movie called D3MON, about a haunted demon app, is supposed to fall into. It is supposed to be another finger-wagging sermon about how phones are rotting our souls, the kind of techno-panic horror where the real villain is a screen and the moral is to put down your device before it eats you. Nick Lyon looked at that easy version and walked the other way. As he puts it, “the technology isn’t the monster, it’s the delivery system.” That single reframing is why Do You Want to Play?, which world-premieres this afternoon at FrightFest in London, sounds more interesting than its app-store hook lets on. This is not a movie about the dangers of your phone. It is a movie about the far older and far more human danger of knocking on a door you cannot close.
The setup makes the idea literal, which I love. The film opens at the launch party for D3MON, a slick new consumer app, where teenage Emily and her friends decide to play the original D3MON BOARD, the physical occult spirit board the software was supposedly based on. Then the trick lands: as they work the analog board, the app starts answering too. Two doorways, one presence, and the same ancient thing waiting on the other side of both of them. What begins as a party novelty becomes an invitation nobody knows how to rescind, and something old and patient starts taking up residence inside Emily. Her boyfriend Tommy and a programmer named Owen are left trying to slam a door they never understood was open.
Lyon has said the plainest and smartest thing about his own premise, which is that the doorway keeps changing but the impulse never does. Every generation just finds a new way to knock on the same old door. Our grandparents had the spirit board and the seance. We have an app with a stylized demon logo. Same knock, same door, newer hardware. To seal that idea into the film, Lyon gives us Gary, a former Jesuit turned paranormal broadcaster played by Ricco Ross, the veteran you will recognize from James Cameron’s Aliens. Gary is the one who realizes that whatever these kids have summoned is much older than the technology carrying it, the human thread connecting a phone notification to something that was frightening people centuries before electricity. That is a genuinely good structural instinct: use the newest gadget as bait, then reveal the oldest fear underneath.
The whole thing rests on its young lead, and the casting here is quietly perfect. Emily is played by Quinn Aune, who has spent the last couple of years building an unusual and telling little niche. She played the young version of Anya Taylor-Joy on Apple’s Lucky, and the young version of Nicole Kidman on Amazon’s Scarpetta. She is, in other words, the actress studios trust to convincingly be the childhood of their biggest stars, and now she gets to be the star herself. There is a lovely rhyme in that, because the woman she stood in for on Lucky, Anya Taylor-Joy, broke out of exactly this genre with The Witch and Split. Horror is where those careers get made, and Aune is stepping onto that same launch pad with her own possession showcase.
Lyon clearly knows it, too. His whole pitch for the movie is that the scares only work if the people do first. He has said Aune never played the horror-movie version of the role, just a real teenager who is scared and angry and slowly realizing she may not be in control of her own life anymore. That is the correct priority for this kind of film, and it is a notable one coming from Lyon specifically. The man has directed more than forty movies across horror, action, science fiction, and thriller, a genre workhorse’s resume, and he is calling Do You Want to Play? his most character-driven picture yet. A possession story that lives or dies on whether you believe in the friendships before the demon shows up is a harder, better swing than the logline suggests, and it is the same instinct that makes the best small-budget supernatural horror land far above its weight class.
Here is the practical rundown, kept in one place. Do You Want to Play? makes its world premiere at FrightFest London on Sunday, August 30 at 3:45 in the afternoon, screening in the festival’s discovery strand. It was written, directed, and produced by Nick Lyon, produced alongside Glenn Kendrick Ackermann and David Marsh of Scary Content, who are also handling international sales as the film starts meeting buyers. Michael and Atlas Von Poncet executive produce, with Atlas Von Poncet also appearing on screen, and Michelle Ng co-produces. The cast is led by Quinn Aune with Max Mushallo, Leo Larson, and Ricco Ross. Jeffrey Carolan shot it, Sean Olson cut it, and Christopher Cano scored it. No wider release has been announced yet, which is exactly what a festival premiere is for.
So here is my flag in the ground, contradictions welcome. I have not seen a frame of it, so I am not grading anything, and plenty of possession movies open a door and then have no idea what to do with the thing that walks through it. But I will take a horror filmmaker who understands that the phone was never the villain over one more lazy screen-time cautionary tale any day of the week. Lyon picked the right room for the reveal, too. FrightFest is a crowd that knows every trick this genre has, which means they will be the first to spot whether the idea underneath the gimmick actually holds. If it plays there this afternoon, it will play anywhere. Do you want to play? I kind of do.
