Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Red Rose’ On Netflix, Where A Group Of Teens Are Terrorized By A Very Demanding App

Kids and their phones these days. They never put them down, and they always seem to be texting someone. A new British horror series proposes that teens are so addicted to their phones that an app can control their lives if they’re not careful. Um, isn’t that what TikTok is for?

RED ROSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Manchester, UK.” As “Carol Of The Bells” plays, a girl in a hood exits a building.

The Gist: The girl is haunted by the song, and as she enters her modern home, it’s freezing. She can’t make the music stop. The only way she can get away from it is to take a dive off the roof, which kills her.

Six months later, in Bolton, a group of students are celebrating their last day of high school. Rochelle Mason (Isis Hainsworth) is in a contemplative mood but is brought out of her funk by her best friend, Wren Davis (Amelia Clarkson). They’re joined by Ashley (Natalie Blair), Noah (Harry Redding), Antony (Ellis Howard) and Taz (Ali Khan) as the class celebrates the end of the school year on a hilltop near an ancient castle.

Roch goes off by herself when she sees Wren and Noah kissing, and gets a link from one of her classmates to an app called Red Rose. The app starts off by asking her personal questions, like how she’s feeling and if she needs help.

What she finds out, as she watches her twin sisters while her father Vinny (Samuel Anderson) is at work, is that Red Rose can grant her wishes. When it commands her to write three wishes on her mirror, one of them is “Wealth.” Given that their family is always on the financial edge, she’s shocked when she sees the power in her house flicker back on, despite the fact that the meter showed her that it was out of funds.

As Roch becomes more surly about her situation that summer, the more she lashes out, especially at Wren. For instance, she tells Wren’s mother (Natalie Gavin) that Wren has been seeing her estranged father Rick (Adam Nagaitis), and she also outs Wren and Noah in front of their friend group. She’s egged on by Red Rose; in some cases, it demands that she do things like kiss Noah at a party, but in others it manipulates text messages she sends and receives.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Red Rose is reminiscent of I Know What You Did Last Summer, except an app is directing all of the horror shenanigans instead of a voice on a phone.

Our Take: Red Rose definitely gets off to a promising start; it even takes the standard “teens partying in the woods” scene that we’ve seen about a million times in recent years and elevates it, placing the party on the undulating landscape near some ruins. It makes for quite the scene, where dozens of teens in school uniforms, dancing and getting crapfaced.

Creators Michael and Paul Clarkson capture just how much of the lives of today’s teens revolve around their phones and social media, to the point where we completely believe that these teens are listening to what this random app is telling them to do. Ignoring it isn’t a consequence-free move, though, and as Roch finds out, even when you listen to it, it can still somehow humiliate you.

Two concepts that make us wonder: Will the whole “app threatens people and drives them mad” conceit get old after a few episodes, and just what is going on in Roch’s life that makes her so melancholy to begin with? We know that she lost her mother Gloria (Ellie James) some time ago, and the app actually makes her see a sketchy apparition of her mother when she takes video in the woods. We also know that her family’s money problems are a sore point, as we see when she takes her sisters to a food bank.

What we hope is that not only do we find out about Roch and the rest of her friends’ lives — Wren seeing her estranged father has particularly intriguing possibilities — but we also hope that the friends get to the bottom of who exactly is behind Red Rose and why the app knows so much about the lives of its users.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Roch sees video of her sisters, and a mysterious voice says, “I’ll take care of them”. She then sees the apparition of her mother standing behind the twins as they look out the window.

Sleeper Star: This is a good spot to mention Ashna Rabheru, who plays Jaya. We don’t see a lot of her in the first episode, but she does mention a “cousin in Manchester,” which makes us wonder if she’s related somehow to the girl who dove off her roof the previous Christmas.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Red Rose gifts Roch a sparkly dress and sequin-adorned sneakers, she tells her buddies that “I inherited them.” Couldn’t she come up with a better lie? Even saying she won a raffle would have been more believable.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Red Rose starts off on solid footing, setting up a season full scary twists and turns that we hope don’t get too ridiculous.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.