Tell Me How I Die is a 2016 science fiction thriller starring Nathan Kress, Virginia Gardner, Ryan Higa, Ethan Peck, Kirby Bliss-Blanton, William Mapother, and Mark Rolston.
At a remote facility, a drug trial is performed on a group of college students when it turns out that it gives them the ability to see their own deaths. Then people start dying just as a snowstorm cuts them all off from the outside world and it turns out that someone is stalking the facility.
This film provides examples of:
- The Bad Guy Wins: A precognitive serial killer stalks a remote facility where the drug that gave him his powers is being tested on a new group of patients. The protagonists never manage to surprise him since he can always anticipate their next step, being a much stronger precog than they are. He kills off all but one character (a second is technically alive as well, but fatally injured), gets his revenge on the doctor responsible for his condition, and disappears into a snowstorm after sharing a final look with the female lead.
- Dissonant Serenity: The killer is extremely calm while violently murdering people, explained by his precognition making everything completely predictable.
- Eerie Arctic Research Station: It is actually a slasher set in the mainland U.S., but at a remote drug testing facility somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, so close enough. It shares all the elements of everyone being there for a purpose, the hostile snowy weather preventing anyone from leaving, etc.
- Hope Spot: Anna acquires the same precognitive abilities that the killer possesses, and during the climax she uses it to foresee his moves and save her boyfriend from being stabbed to death. Then it turns out that this was part of the killer's vision, and all he has to do is slightly adjust his pattern to render her effort null and void.
- Invincible Villain: The villain is an advanced precog who can flawlessly see months into the future. He's always at least five steps ahead of the main characters, and although some of his victims definitely deserved their fate, his killing spree goes off without a hitch and he escapes before the police can find him. Even when the heroine acquires precognitive abilities of her own in order to predict his moves, he still outperforms her.
- Mad Oracle: A pharmaceutical company is experimenting on a drug that allows people to see into the future. The villain is a patient from a previous drug trial who was given increasingly higher doses until the visions took a toll on his sanity and he started getting visions where he violently murdered everyone around him.
- Morton's Fork: One of the characters gives himself a dose of the drug tested at the remote facility so he will have the same future visions as his friends and can anticipate the next move of the (equally prescient, though far more advanced) killer stalking the premises. At one point he has two alternatives on what to do next: he can either try to hide in a parked car but then sees the killer attacking him from behind, or try to hide in a nearby garage where he sees the killer also attacking him. There's no third option: he can't re-enter the rest of the building because the doors are all mechanically locked, and if he tries to flee on foot then the snow storm will undoubtedly kill him. It turns out both visions were true: the first attack at the garage causes him to flee to the car instead, but he forgot about the rear door he left open to grab a blanket previously so the killer can sneak up behind him and stab him to death.
- Prescience Is Predictable: The killer in the film is a previous participant in a series of clinical trials that a pharmaceutical company is performing to test a drug that gives people visions of the future. These visions were initially fairly limited but then they kept giving him more of the drug, and since the effect is cumulative he eventually started to see events months in advance. Video logs show that at some point he didn't even bother explaining the visions to people anymore since none of them could affect their outcome and even as an Ax-Crazy killer he just seems bored by everything that happens and the main characters' futile attempts to stop him.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: An experimental drug gives people who use it visions of the future, including their own (violent) deaths at the hands of a killer stalking the testing facility. It's left ambiguous whether people can influence the visions they have or the visions influence the people having them, but the female lead eventually realizes that it works as a self-fulfilling prophecy because every character she told about the manner in which she saw them die ultimately do so in the exact way she described by trying to prevent it, while the only person that she didn't explicitly tell about hers died in a different manner than the vision predicted.
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: The psychic killer addresses the main characters through a video recording that was shot several months before, since he already knew that they would be watching the tape at some point.
- Uncertain Doom: In the climax, the male lead is stabbed through the chest by the killer, but the female lead helps him up and tries to get him to a doctor. The film ends before we can see if she succeeds or not.
