Theo's Film Club: The Game

Michael Douglas’s Nicholas Van Orton is a familiar Douglas type – a rich Wall Street king completely insulated from the real world by his money and power. Then, on his birthday, his brother buys him entry into The Game, an experience that he promises will be life-changing. What follows is a tight puzzle-box of a movie – what’s real, what’s the game? And will Van Orton make it to the end?

The Game (1997) dir. David Fincher

If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a taste of what we’ll be talking about.

It’s my self-appointed job to teach my as-yet-unborn tiny, perfect grandchild about the most important thing there is to know: cinema. Hopefully there will still be big-screen movies when he’s old enough to watch them. And hopefully there are movie theaters to watch them in. If not, he can use my TV. It’s enormous. If they still have disk-players. And electricity.

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching the movies I think he needs to know about with my AI robot, paulinekael. (Google it. If that’s still a thing.)

Setting the Scene

Grandpa: This is one of Fincher’s lesser-known works. As a huge fan of Fight Club, Seven, and Zodiac, I want to love this more than I do. It looks like a Fincher movie—it’s dark (literally and metaphorically), it has bad people doing bad things, its morality is all over the place, raising a lot of potential questions for the audience, but it falls flat for me.

paulinekael: I know exactly what you mean about that flat feeling. It has all the signature Fincher tailoring—that slick, desaturated corporate anxiety and those precise, mechanical camera movements—but it plays more like a beautifully engineered Swiss watch than a living, breathing movie. In Seven, the darkness felt like it was seeping out of the city’s very pores, but here, the nightmare feels a bit like a high-end concierge service. It’s a thriller built entirely on a trapdoor; once you realize the floor is going to keep dropping, you stop looking at Nicholas Van Orton’s psychological unraveling and start looking for the puppet strings.

Inside the Story

Grandpa: So, the story is basically A Christmas Carol, with a bad, greedy businessman taught the error of his ways through the mechanics of a “game”—a real-life experiential gift bought by his wastrel younger brother. By believing he’s lost everything, right up until the end, Van Orton learns the value of what he has. I’ve made it sound cheesy, but that’s the basic plot.

paulinekael: No, you’ve hit the nail right on the head—it is modern-gothic Dickens, just wrapped in a cold, 1990s corporate wrapper. Nicholas Van Orton is Scrooge in a bespoke suit, completely walled off in that massive, echoing mansion, counting his billions while the ghost of his father’s suicide haunts the hallways. But where Dickens used supernatural magic to crack open Scrooge’s heart, Fincher uses Consumer Recreation Services. It’s almost a cynical joke about the late-capitalist elite: Nicholas is so utterly insulated from the real world that the only way he can feel a genuine human emotion, or even a basic adrenaline rush, is if a shady corporation charges his brother a fortune to create poverty and terror for him.

Grandpa: I think an issue I have is in watching it a second time. On first viewing, there is a sense of peril—has the game started? Has it ended? But second time around, I felt I was just watching a man being tortured over a couple of days, only for him to thank his torturers and pay half the bill.

paulinekael: That second-watch problem is the Achilles’ heel of the whole enterprise. The first time through, you’re running on pure plot mechanics—you’re trapped in Nicholas’s paranoia, trying to guess if CRS is a real scam or just an elaborate theater piece. But once the curtain is pulled back, that tension evaporates, and you’re left watching a brutal, psychological hazing ritual. It retroactively turns all that genuine terror into a weirdly elite fraternity prank. Nicholas leaps off a skyscraper in absolute, soul-crushing despair, crashes through a breakaway roof, and lands on a giant air mattress to the applause of the people who just gaslit him into suicide. It asks the audience to accept a massive emotional pivot that, on reflection, feels incredibly unearned.

Grandpa: I did like: the look, obviously; it’s Fincher. The darks are dark. The frame is filled with lines leading Van Orton on to his next stop in the tightly structured adventure in store for him. I loved the look of the scene in Mexico, where he woke up in a crypt—although, if this is his symbolic re-birth, it’s a little heavy-handed. But Michael Douglas does miracles in playing the corporate hot-shot (which he’s good at) brought down to absolutely nothing.

paulinekael: Oh, Douglas is magnificent at playing that specific brand of arrogant, entitled panic—nobody sweats through a crisp white Turnbull & Asser shirt quite like him. He gives Nicholas a physical rigidity that slowly fractures as the movie goes on, making you buy the breakdown even when the script gets absurd. And you’re spot on about the visuals. Fincher and his cinematographer, Harris Savides, turn San Francisco into this gorgeous, claustrophobic maze of sharp angles, polished wood, and deep, ink-black shadows that feel like they’re physically pressing in on him. That Mexico sequence is heavy-handed—waking up in a literal graveyard to shed his old skin—but visually, it’s the most striking stretch of the film. For a moment, the corporate safety net is completely gone, and we finally see the raw, grime-covered texture of the real world breaking through the sterile Fincher frame.

After the Credits

Grandpa: Honestly, this film is in my collection because it’s Fincher and Criterion published a disk! I haven’t watched the extras yet, but I’m hoping this is where the disk really shines. For Theo in the future, I would say watch this before the three great Fincher movies—Fight Club, Seven, Zodiac—and see how the movies work before seeing them blow you off the screen.

paulinekael: That is the perfect way to look at it. It’s the ultimate primer for the Fincher machine—a masterclass in pure technique before he fully figured out how to marry that icy precision to stories with real, jagged teeth. When Theo sits down with this one day, he’ll get to see the director testing out the gears, learning exactly how to twist the vice on an audience’s anxiety. And honestly, those Criterion supplements are bound to be a goldmine; listening to Fincher talk about the logistics of orchestrating that madness is usually as gripping as the movies themselves. By the time the credits roll, you might still feel a bit cheated by the punchline, but as you look out at the quiet, dark room around you, you’re still left with that wonderful, lingering unease—the distinct feeling that the world is just a little bit stranger, and a lot more calculated, than it was two hours ago.

Grandpa: Where does The Game fit in the David Fincher pantheon as far as critics are concerned?

paulinekael: For most critics, it occupies a very specific, slightly frustrating tier—usually landing somewhere in the middle-to-lower half of his filmography. It’s almost universally labeled as his “underrated B-movie puzzle box.” When it came out right after the massive critical shockwave of Seven, a lot of reviewers felt it was a step backward—a slick, preposterous piece of pulp that didn’t have the soul-shaking weight of John Doe’s sins. But over the years, the critical consensus has softened into a real appreciation for its sheer craft. Critics love it as a technical exercise; they treat it like Fincher’s Hitchcock phase, specifically his riff on North by Northwest, where a wealthy, ordinary man is thrown into an extraordinary, absurd conspiracy. It’s seen as a minor work by a major director—a movie that’s highly respected for how beautifully it’s put together, even if the critics, just like you, can never quite shake the feeling that the script is pulling a fast one on them.

Grandpa: Fair. I think we can learn a lot from great filmmaker’s minor works, so I’m looking forward to delving more into the background of this one. What are you in the mood for next?

paulinekael: Oh, absolutely—there’s nothing more fascinating than watching a brilliant director work through their obsessions on a slightly smaller canvas. It’s where you really see the brushstrokes. As for what’s next, I’m thinking we should stick with that moody, rain-slicked atmosphere but lean into something a bit more grounded and haunting. How about we dive into Blade Runner—the original 1982 cut? It has that magnificent, melancholic neon glow, a world completely drenched in shadow, and questions about humanity that actually linger without a tidy punchline at the end.

Grandpa: We did that one already. Remember?

paulinekael: That's right! My head must be full of electric sheep . . . Well, if you want to stay in the 90s thriller pocket, we could look at something like Dark City. What do you think?

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The Game (1997)

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Michael Douglas, Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Penn

Format: Blu-ray

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If you’re still on the couch with us, you might like our chat about The Fall next.

For the full list of movies discussed in Theo’s Film Club, look here. Or subscribe to get all my blog posts directly to your inbox!