The Game, David Fincher’s Criterion-approved Michael Douglas thriller, is now streaming on Peacock

It’s hard to keep a David Fincher film quiet. Since making the jump from ads and music videos to feature films with Alien 3, the director has been continually attached to high-profile projects with big-name stars, screenwriters, and/or source materials. Given all that, it’s remarkable how Fincher’s 1997 thriller The Game has managed to stay relatively under the radar, especially in the streaming era, when it’s not as available as his Netflix projects and seems like less of a Blu-ray library fixture than Fincher’s other movies of the ’90s. That’s why The Game’s recent arrival on Peacock, where it’s currently streaming, is kind of a big deal.

Among those early Fincher films, The Game is arguably the second-most-successful by traditional metrics, outdone only by his seminal 1995 horror film Seven. It was precisely the surprise success of Seven that dwarfed Fincher’s immediate follow-up, even though The Game made more money than Fight Club and was much better-received than Alien 3. The movie might have also suffered by its ability to truly blend into its environment. While Seven and Fight Club read as ’90s movies in ostentatious, grunge-adjacent ways that take advantage of Fincher’s stylish music-video background, The Game is more genuinely evocative of the time period. After all, it’s a vaguely Hitchcockian Michael Douglas thriller that came out in between other vaguely Hitchcockian Michael Douglas thrillers like Disclosure and A Perfect Murder (the latter an actual remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder). These movies attempted to bring the Douglas audiences knew from era-defining films like Wall Street and Fatal Attraction into respectable Baby Boomer middle age.

It’s the presence of Douglas that both emphasizes the themes of The Game and helps camouflage its Fincher-ness. Douglas plays — you’ll never believe it! — a wealthy and somewhat chilly banker who we’re nonetheless invited to identify with as he receives what starts to look like a nightmarish comeuppance! Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is anti-celebrating his 48th birthday when he’s visited by his screw-up younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn), who gives him a gift certificate to an elaborate real-life role-playing experience run by a company called Consumer Recreation Services.

Though Nicholas initially seems to be rejected by CRS for failing their rigorous psychological exam, he encounters a series of strange, eerie, and increasingly alarming events: surveillance, violent attacks, and possible looting of his personal fortune, making him paranoid about how far this conspiracy reaches. A seemingly helpful waitress (Deborah Kara Unger) may actually be a CRS employee. His brother may actually be in danger. The game, as one character says early on, becomes figuring out what the game actually is. How much of what Nicholas is experiencing is real? Does it even count as unreal if he’s feeling genuine fear and paranoia?

It’s a measure of Fincher’s reputation that this paranoid thriller, whichincludes suicidal ideation as a major plot point, seems to be considered one of his lighter entertainments — you know, like Panic Room (child endangerment) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (serial killing, sexual assault). And it’s true that The Game is his least violent movie of the ’90s. It also doesn’t wallow in its pervasive grimness like Seven (a great movie that nonetheless has some edgelord tendencies) nor turn that grimness into a satirical joke like Fight Club (a great movie that nonetheless… well, you get the idea). Fincher’s later films take a more controlled and less overtly self-conscious approach to his subjects; in Zodiac and The Social Network, his exacting style remains, but he seems less prone to showing off.

Image: NBC/Universal

In a way, The Game pre-visions that turn, albeit to less ambitious ends. Fincher takes the established Douglas persona of a wealthy, chilly-yet-likably-smart guy who’s aging out of the “yuppie” designation and relocates him into something resembling a ’70s paranoia thriller. Only in The Game, there isn’t any political window dressing to the CRS manipulations, no greater danger for Nicholas to uncover as a de facto truth-seeker. This time, it’s personal. Nicholas isn’t being targeted because he knows too much. It seems more likely he’s being targeted because of what he doesn’t know about himself or how to live more fully, letting his advantages outweigh his past traumas.

This can be read as a solipsistic repurposing of movies reflecting a particular Watergate-era national mood. The flashier Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott and released the following year, at least has the decency to incorporate tech paranoia into its popcorn version of those ’70s films, while The Game feels almost pre-internet in its various analog deceptions. (Yes, there are some money-transfer shenanigans that could only be done electronically, but the movie ultimately feels too well-heeled to be part of the mid-’90s internet boom.) Fincher’s film can also be read as a movie that recognizes how many conspiracy thrillers ultimately are more about inviting the audience to identify with persecuted movie stars than actually exploring anything related to real-world politics. Of course the object of the game is ultimately for a rich middle-aged guy to find his way! Isn’t it always?

Image: Polygram Filmed Entertainment/Everett Collection

That lightly satirical sensibility thrums beneath the black-and-blue, green-and-brown nighttime thrills of the movie itself, and it’s probably arguable as to whether The Game entirely goes above and beyond a fun mystery ride. It does for the audience exactly what the mysterious CRS initially promises to Nicholas: It gives them an impeccably designed bit of unreal entertainment. But the film feels coolly self-assured and introspective when positioned between the alternately hotheaded and despairing heroes of Seven and the prangst (that’s prankster angst) of Fight Club. Those movies ultimately ask if everything in the world is bullshit with great seriousness (even within the jokes of Fight Club). The Game poses the same question with a wink, as if Fincher is trying to figure out a way for that existential despair to turn, however improbably, into personal improvement.

According to the filmmaker himself, he didn’t quite crack it — or at least that was his feeling during a 2014 interview where he credited his wife and producing partner for warning him against doing the movie and admits he doesn’t feel that he found the right final act. (It’s true, as with so many broader conspiracies, that the actual solution threatens to underwhelm.) Then again, The Game is one of two Fincher movies in the Criterion Collection (and the other might surprise you even more). Maybe he, too, identified with Nicholas against his best instincts, finding his way through the ’90s boom times and eventually making it out the other side, spiritually intact.