Game had its UK première at Mayhem, 16th Oct 2025, and is now available on digital and Blu-ray from Invada Films
As a pheasant forages in the woods, a figure in waterproof boots stalks and sneaks in closer and closer before raising his club for the (offscreen) kill. So when, after this prologue, the title Game appears in white sans serif capitals on a red background, it seems clear that the word’s reference is to wild animals hunted for food or sport. Yet in these woods, with their endless ambient sounds of Darwinian struggle, another kind of animal lies vulnerable and exposed, easy prey to the forces of nature.
That animal is David (Marc Bessant), a middle-class kidult and the embodiment of generational decline. He is the kind of guy who would rob his own parents rather than work – and also the kind of guy who, having just stumbled upon an overdosing dealer at an outdoor rave, opportunistically runs off with the man’s cash and stash instead of helping him. Yet David is about to find the shoe on the other foot, and have his life literally overturned. For in his flight from the rave down a country road at night, he somehow crashes into the woods, upending his car, and is left injured and suspended from what was previously the floor of his vehicle, unable to free himself. David is caught in a trap of his own making, stained with his own piss and vomit, and surrounded by compromising illegal substances.
The only other person in these woods is the Poacher (Jason Williamson) from the prologue, who, some days later, finds David still hanging upside-down in the car and very much the worse for wear. The problem for David is that the Poacher immediately – and accurately – recognises him as “a cunt”, and refuses to intervene. In fact, for all the Poacher’s expressions of disdain towards city folk, these two men are remarkably alike. For both are thieves, illegally taking what is not theirs, and when the Poacher refuses to help David, it is hardly different from the way that David earlier failed to help the dealer. The Poacher too, after all, is something of a cunt, and is about to get a taste of his own medicine – or at least of David’s.
The game that ensues between them is all at once super tense and utterly absurd, as the Poacher, though definitely having the upper hand, does not count on just how far David is willing to go to survive. Accordingly this feature debut from director John Minton, also the first feature to emerge from Geoff (Portishead) Barrow’s Invada Films, is a peculiar collision of predatory nature and Nineties rave culture, with those deep dark woods slowly transforming (at least in one character’s hallucinating mind) into both church and dance floor, while also proving, for all their apparent remoteness, to abut a crowded garden centre.
Co-written by Rob Williams, Barrow, Bessant and Minton, Game is shot by DP Ross James mostly in claustrophobic close-ups which are edited together by Minton like a jigsaw puzzle whose jumbled pieces the viewer must synthesise to see the bigger picture. Yet that big picture is of a little Britain – petty, insular, selfish and cruel. For far from being the Second Summer of Love, this is an anti-nostalgic, MDMA-laced bad trip through dog-eat-dog England, with both these men banally vying for their stolen place on the food chain. It ends as it began, with stalking in the woods – or at least with a hilariously bizarre cat-and-mouse sequence conducted at a limping pace.
Indeed there is something almost Beckettian in David’s hopeless efforts to escape his sticky predicament and stave off his mortality, all so that he can maybe come back down to a life which remains as pathetically mundane as it was before, but whose simple pleasures he perhaps may appreciate more. Barrow, Ben Salisbury and Jamie Paton score David’s ordeal to some bangin’ electronica – but the noises of the forest (courtesy of sound designers George Ramsden and Martin Pavey) are every bit as heady, in a film where everyone in the end is a beast in the jungle, just trying to get by and play a few rounds in the surreal circle of life.
strap: Absurdist trip in the woods: John Minton’s 90s-set debut feature shows a feckless thief trapped by a car, a poacher and (his own) nature
© Anton Bitel
