Every now and then I try to expand my horizons a little as I write this thing. I know for a fact that I have my wheelhouse (pretty much anything A24 distributes), and I’m very aware of the sort of stuff I don’t like, but I also know that there’s always the possibility that I’ll get stuck in a rut, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past when I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Every now and then I’ll try to break one of my internal “rules” that I use when I’m flipping through movies looking for something to watch, just to see what happens. It occurred to me this last weekend that most of my viewing history lies heavily in North America and the UK, with a smattering of Japanese or Korean horror films. There are exceptions, but not many, so I went looking for something from elsewhere in the world. Broadening your horizons is a good thing.
Game Over, however, is not really a good thing. It’s a ludicrous, confused mishmash of stories that don’t really work together, with some pretty gross sexual politics to boot. I’m going to end up pretty much spoiling this one entirely, because it’s difficult to explain what’s wrong with it without getting into details. And there’s a lot wrong with it.
The film opens with a photo of a woman, with a number scratched into the corner of the photo. We cut to a shot of this woman outside of her apartment, paying for a food delivery. The point of view is from across the street. Then it’s from just outside her window. Then inside the apartment, as nightvision. Someone is stalking her. And then they’re killing her, beheading her and burning her body.
Cut to a title card that says “One Year Later” and…another story entirely. We’re introduced to Sapna, a video game designer. She’s got a really nice place in Chennai, with a gated entrance, a security guard, and a maid, a woman named Kalamma who frets over her. She works on designing games, she spends a lot of time playing Pac-Man. She’s got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a pixelated heart with a game controller inside of it. She doesn’t sleep much. She doesn’t like leaving the house, she won’t return her parents’ calls. She really doesn’t like the dark.
And now, on New Year’s Day, she’s starting to suffer mysterious pains in her wrist, right where the tattoo is. Exactly one year after getting it. One year later.
What does this have to do with the opening? Who can say? At least at first, this appears to be a story about how Sapna is more or less a prisoner in her own home for reasons that aren’t really clear at first, and the mysterious pain that may or may not be related to her tattoo. The first act is mostly just Sapna not wanting to talk to her parents, wondering why her wrist hurts, and going to therapy (where she goes through VR sessions intended to treat her fear of the dark, and strongly resemble a video game), punctuated by flashbacks to the events of a year before. When, as it eventually turns out, Sapna was abducted and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Day, on her way home from getting the tattoo. The anniversary is hitting her hard.
And this is where one of my biggest problems with the movie comes in. I think it’s possible to use difficult, uncomfortable subject matter in horror and to use it well, but this…this ain’t it. At no point does Sapna’s pain and trauma and all of their consequences register as anything more than a prop, a contrivance to set up the events of the final act. She’s a woman in a country immersed in institutionalized rape culture - to the point that her parents effectively blame her for what happened to her - and it’s lingered on more than is necessary for the story, culminating in a pretty nasty sequence in a café, where Sapna discovers that her assault was recorded and distributed online when two bros at an adjacent table start arguing about whether or not she’s “the girl in the video” and bring up the footage on their smartphones. Sapna is suicidal by this point, but it’s not treated with any respect or gravity at all, it’s just there so an attempt can leave her wheelchair-bound during the climax. It all feels distastefully glib and more than a little prurient.
So there’s that, but then there’s my other big problem with this film - it careens from one narrative to another with little regard for any kind of through-line. If the first act is about establishing why Sapna is like she is, the second act is what seems to be a…ghost story? Apparently (speaking of contrivances), there was a mix-up at the tattoo studio where Sapna got her work done, and she got tattooed with ink containing ashes from…the remains of the woman murdered at the beginning of the movie. Maybe this is why she’s experiencing this mysterious the woman who was murdered at the beginning of the film. That also happened a year ago, and so maybe Sapna is experiencing her mysterious pain…because…ghost? It’s not really clear, we just find out that her name was Amudha, that she got tattooed at the same shop, and her mother came in after her death with the intent of getting a memorial tattoo that contained some of her daughter’s ashes but whoops! There’s a long film-within-a-film sequence as we (via Sapna) watch a tribute video Amudha’s mother put together after her murder celebrating her life and the cancer that she beat back into remission not one, but three times. Amudha got three hearts tattooed on her arm - one for each time her cancer went back into remission.
And that’s going to be important, because in the third act it all comes together in the weirdest, most artificial way possible as the killer from the opening targets Sapna. Except it isn’t one killer, it’s three - a gang of men in identical masks and jumpsuits who apparently just go around murdering women, maybe because they got tattoos? That’s not really clear either, though Sapna’s parents are weirdly shaming about her having a tattoo, suggesting that it marks her as less virtuous and so maybe she was kind of asking for what happened to her and it’s all just fucking gross so let’s get back to the third act, which, if the first was half-assed psychological horror (it was) and the second was a half-assed ghost story (it was) , then the third act is a half-assed siege film that goes entirely off the rails as the initially metaphorical becomes really literal in just the most baffling way.
See, Sapna’s incessantly playing Pac-Man at the beginning. This is a game in which you are relentlessly pursued, and you’re constantly moving around a maze trying to avoid ghosts. Now, in the actual game, there are four ghosts, but in the version Sapna is shown playing, there are only three. There’s also the iconography of the heart - in video games, hearts can symbolize the amount of life or health a playable avatar has. Okay, with me so far? All of this metaphor become skull-clutchingly literal as the three killers (like the three ghosts in the version of Pac-Man she plays) stalk her through her own house, and now all of a sudden there are three hearts on her wrist, not one, like Amudha had, and so what happens next is that either Sapna and Kalamma gets caught and murdered, and then Sapna wakes up back at the start of the night with one less heart on her wrist just like in a video game. It makes no fucking sense in the context of anything that came before, except maybe in that it makes the first two acts seem even more artificial than they already did. Really, it just seems like an excuse to murder Sapna and Kalamma over and over again, prolonging their suffering in a way that seems downright sadistic. Basically, Sapna wakes back up, knows what to do differently the next time, then takes another shot at it, but each instance involves long, lingering takes on violence against her and Kalamma.
So why is Sapna, as a character, traumatized? Because the filmmakers need something to make her helpless. When the psychological trauma doesn’t do, she attempts suicide and ends up with both legs badly broken so now she’s in a wheelchair with physical trauma as well, on top of parents who essentially blame her for her own rape. The bit with the ashes is, I guess, meant to either be something inspirational (though it comes off more maudlin than anything) or maybe that’s why she has “multiple lives” now, for…reasons? It really feels like the filmmakers had ideas for three different movies and couldn’t decide which one to make, so they made all of them instead, stitching them together with the thinnest of pretexts and using a genuinely upsetting subject as the springboard for a series of things that needed to happen to make the movie work. It’s shoddy storytelling and disrespectful to people who’ve gone through what they put their characters through. Suffering and trauma used as a prop, trauma from rape no less, in a film that has no idea what story it wants to tell.
I’m not somebody who watches horror films to be entertained, really - I want to be unsettled, disturbed, moved to feel something I wouldn’t otherwise, and so I don’t have any problem with difficult or “problematic” subject matter. But, for Christ’s sake, make it mean something, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Don’t just treat it like a plot device. I definitely felt something when this film was over, but it was mostly just baffled, and a little mad at what I’d just seen. What a waste.
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