Official synopsis
At a Halloween party inside a notorious murder house, fifteen-year-old Emily opens a digital spirit board and invites an ancient entity into her body. To save her, her boyfriend Tommy must join forces with Owen — the app’s creator and his former best friend — before possession becomes permanent.
Review
Writer/director Nick Lyon’s Do You Want to Play? Has an odd feel to it. The drama, including a love triangle between three Christian private high school students, along with many plot elements have a gateway horror flavor to them, but the carnage and gore is much stronger than I would imagine many preteen viewers might be ready for. More seasoned fright-fare viewers would find the gruesome elements more to their liking but find the other proceedings to be better suited for a juvenile audience. Still, the film offers some interesting updating of spirit board movie chills to the digital world of today’s teens.
Lyons does an admirable job of making the protagonists — Emily (Quinn Aune), her boyfriend Tommy (Leo Larson) and Tommy’s formerly best friend Owen (Maxwell Mushallo), with solid performances from the young cast members — likable. Even initially somewhat arrogant Owen, who created the Ouija-like phone app that wreaks deadly havoc among themselves and their classmates, has his sympathetic side. The diabolical entity that users raise through the app — the spirit of someone who murdered his abusive father as a child and then sliced off his face to wear as a mask — is eerily effective as the villainous presence.
No horror film addressing religious good vs. demonic evil would be complete without a church authority figure, and here we have “Scary Gary” (Ricco Ross), a priest turned social media influencer. Thanks to teens’ addiction to such things, our two boy protagonists have someone to turn to when Emily becomes possessed.
Obviously, a lot goes on in Do You Want to Play?, and though experienced horror viewers will recognize tropes from previous possession films, Lyon and his cast and crew deliver plenty of engaging reasons to give the overall enjoyable film a watch.
Do You Want to Play? screened as part of Tubi FrightFest 2026, which ran August 27–31 in London, U.K.
