Film Screening 18th April, 2018

Poster for Game Night

Game Night 

7:30 PM, 18th April, 2018

  • MA
  • 100 mins
  • 2018
  • John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
  • Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Jeffrey Wright

In the Hollywood studio meetings of popular cliché, where every film ever pitched is pitched as something meets something else, this is The Game meets Clue. If you haven’t seen both, and my guess is that’s the vast majority of the Australian population these days, then what we have here is – give me a moment – a murder mystery, slash thriller, slash black comedy, slash slashing. But a light-hearted one.

A group of friends regularly meet for elaborate game nights: host-a-murders, and the like. This week, Max (Bateman) will invite everyone to his house and outdo all his predecessors with the most thorough, fiendishly clever, photorealistic murder mystery suburbia has ever seen. He warns his guests to expect the unexpected… at which point a couple of armed thugs burst through the door and kidnap him. And that’s not part of the game. It’s pure coincidence. OR IS IT?

There are twists here, and the cheerfully lowbrow writers and directors know that twists are at their best not when you fail to see them coming, but when you’re having so much of a good time that you don’t care whether you see them coming or not.

Henry Fitzgerald