It’s October, which it means it’s time for spooky games. Which is a great excuse to finally play The Exit 8 (yes, that’s its official title). I watched Backrooms back in July having not previously engaged with the liminal space horror genre before and I… well, I found it underwhelming to the point I couldn’t be bothered to give it a proper review on Letterboxd. I found the parts of the movie that were the most “video gamey” the most interesting though: the idea of this “level” to explore. Mapping it out. The unknown threats. And then I found all the “this is a movie, not a ‘Let’s Play’” stuff really… cringe? Probably because, like everyone, I’m tired of every horror movie being about trauma.
I am pleased to say that neither The Exit 8, nor its cinema adaptation, are about trauma!
To be honest, The Exit 8 isn’t really about anything. It’s a game of pure sensation. When you describe it, it doesn’t really sound like anything. You’re trapped in a Japanese subway station corridor. If there’s something in the corridor that looks different, or something odd is happening (an “anomaly”) you should turn back. If there isn’t–move forwards. If you can manage to do this 8 times in a row, as in make your way forwards/backwards through eight different corridors, you win.
It sounds like… first-person spot the difference. And I guess, mostly, it is. But The Exit 8 is a great example of the one night game–you know, a game that you pick up and you play through in one evening (or any time of day you can set aside.) I last experienced this with Many Nights A Whisper, last year’s exp. GOTY, and while The Exit 8 isn’t quite to that level, it’s similarly deserving of your complete focus in one playthrough.
In fact, I don’t think it would work as well if you put it down and came back to it. I started The Exit 8 a little too late (should really have been in bed) and it was perfect, because I felt trapped. I was trapped in this corridor and couldn’t go to bed until I left it. The Exit 8 isn’t forgiving. If you make a single mistake, you have to start again right from the beginning. Because the game is so short, it wouldn’t work any other way (for what it’s worth, I finished it in an hour, but a “perfect” playthrough would be a handful of minutes.) Each time you miss something, you’re crushed–and you’re confused and annoyed with yourself. “What did I miss?” you’ll ask yourself. “I checked everywhere!” you’ll think, unable to bargain with the game–and you can’t even go back and check.
The Exit 8 is interesting, because it’s not particularly scary. It is, however, excellently unnerving. There will be several moments where you turn the corner and immediately nope out of there because of what you’ve seen; other moments where you push a little forward, knowing it’s an anomaly, but needing to satisfy some curiosity. It’s a classic sort of haunted house, really–you choose to frighten yourself.
The Exit 8 isn’t exactly horror–so it’s perhaps not the perfect way to kick off October (no draculas or wolfmen here!) but it’s a brilliant way to spend an hour. With the right parameters, it’s immediate and visceral in a way that it feels only games can be.
Exit 8 (2025)
But of course, they made a movie of it! Dropping the “The” no one usually notices it’s a savvy adaptation of the game layering story on where there isn’t one (and not even making it about trauma). It cleverly opens in first person, making you think it might be a completely straight adaptation–as an unnamed protagonist, having just received news that his ex is pregnant, suddenly finds himself in the corridors of Exit 8–but as soon as he’s in the corridors the camera pulls back and we get a more traditionally shot film.
What’s interesting about that, though, is that it really pulls into stark relief the difference between movies and games. I just saw Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s take on the legendary franchise, and one of the things I liked about it was how inspired it was by the actual form of video games rather than just the narrative: the forward momentum, the hero’s progression via increasingly powerful weapons. But even with that, you could never say to yourself “oh, it was like I was playing the game.”1
In Exit 8, you kind of feel like you are playing the game. Because The Exit is “just” spot-the-difference, right? And so when you’re watching Exit 8, and you catch the anomalies, it’s kind of got the same pleasure as in the game. When the hero ends up back at zero, it’s a gut punch, almost the same.
But it’s not the same. There’s an authored gaze, and every anomaly you “spot” is served, from the very first one. The focus, the movement of the camera, the positioning on screen. You’re being played, not the other way around.
It’s a movie that invites an active viewer, but I admit that I kept waiting for the anomaly that wasn’t shown to me, that I had to truly catch myself, that never showed up.
In The Exit 8, you’re on your own. If you miss something, you’ll never know what it was. If you don’t move forward, the game will never end. It’s funny to say that experiencing game and film back to back had me feeling pandered to simply by the nature of cinema. “Pfft, it shows me what I need to know? It plays itself? Christ, baby much?”
Exit 8 does, however, do a great job imbuing the setting with meaning–even shifting viewpoints to do so. I was surprised by how moving I found a segment that (in the game) feels like a throwaway The Shining riff, for example. The Exit 8 in becoming Exit 8 becomes a story not about just observation but engagement: truly engaging with the world around you. It’s not about seeing the right thing, but doing the right thing, when it matters, and living up to the potential of what you can be.
This is enriching in retrospect to The Exit 8, and I did wonder–would this have worked if it was there to begin with? Funnily enough, no. Ironically, the moments of struggle and catharsis must be out of our hands. We can’t learn about ourselves what the protagonist of Exit 8 does to do the thing he chooses to do, and it always sucks when they make those moments a cut-scene. Exit 8 only works as a movie the way The Exit 8 only works as a game. One with full control, one with none. One where you embody the struggle to escape, one where you empathise with it.
Both The Exit 8 and Exit 8 are great–and they work perfectly one after the other; in fact, I’d say it’s the only way to do it. Play first, though. You’d spoil the game in a way that you can’t spoil the movie playing them out of order.
Will I ever play it again? Not sure if I’ll give Platform 8 a shot or not. I know it’s short, but I appreciated this experience so much that I kind of want it to be singular, you know? Er, even though it involved two different forms of media. So a… plural experience?
Final Thought: The Exit 8 is particularly fun if you’ve visited Japan and have any experience of Japanese train stations, because you’ve almost certainly: got lost in them, and have a fondness for them anyway. I appreciate that what starts as a “oh, it’s just like I’m there” quickly becomes “I’ve got to get out of here!”
Something I think that’s interesting–but don’t really have a place for–is that both Exit 8 and Resident Evil are based on video games, and both are concerned with the anxiety of “growing up”, in fact having protagonists with the exact same dilemma (an unexpected baby on the way.) To prod at the anxieties of an audience in a permanent adolescence feels savvy in a way that Backrooms’ ironically backwards-looking tropes don’t, and I wonder if we’ll see a sea change in horror themes to fears for our future (considering… everything) rather than attempting to suppress our past. ↩︎
For real though, where to begin. Indian cinema is one that features almost exclusively supermen, by which I mean in the classic DC Superman mould: invincible heroes for whom it is almost hard to find a genuine threat for. The best films, of course, layer the threat on via more than just the potential of bodily harm to the hero–and to be honest, in the very best ones the heroes can still get hurt–but the worst are those that reward the viewer with little thrill or tension and instead only endless aura-farming.
I mean, you can already tell which Toxic is. Toxic, if anything, put me in mind of a Steven Segal movie. You know how in a Steven Segal movie he doesn’t even ever get hit? Sure, there are funny examples of this–I cry laughing at some of the ADR in On Deadly Ground–but there’s usually only so much naked ego you can take.
Rockstar Yash makes Steven Segal look like the humblest man on earth. No, I understand how impossible that sentence sounds. The ego on display here is so completely out of proportion it’s genuinely confusing. Yash plays Raya, an abandoned street kid who becomes India’s most unstoppable gangster as the coolest man that has ever existed, introduced by, and this is not a joke, fucking a woman so well that it blows up a graveyard. When he leaps out and starts to kill dudes, he literally does things like rip their arms off almost without noticing. He’s just. that. powerful.
The reason this is confusing is because Toxic is clearly meant to be Yash’s Scarface. If KGF 2 was his Godfather: Part II taken to 11, this doesn’t so much take Scarface to some absurd number but create a buffer overflow that breaks the calculator. Like Tony Montana, Raya is supposed to ultimately be a tragic figure, someone who destroys not only himself in his ruthless ambition but everyone around him. But he also has to seem like the coolest dude in the world at all times… and he also has to be ruthless and a badass.
This, obviously, does not work. But it does not work on such a heightened level that it’s beyond any cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced before even in Indian cinema (and I’ve watched some absolute nonsense like Indian 2.) I mean, this film literally opens with the woman he supposedly loves blowing herself up in terror with a grenade so he won’t see her. Then he takes the child they had together and throws him off a cliff!1
So that we’re supposed to later invest in his love story with said woman seems… insane? Also, and I have to stress this, during said love story, he, out of nowhere, with no connection to basically anything else in the film, fights a gang of nuns who reveal themselves to be dominatrices (almost exactly like that famously controversial Hitman Absolution trailer) and kills them even more violently than Agent 47 (in fact implying fellatio with his gun as he blows one of their heads off.)
Oh, and he kills like a hundred clowns at one point.
As with a lot of Indian films, when I mention all the insane stuff that happens, you might think “ha, sounds amazing!” but I have never felt more sick in a theatre than when my buddy Justin Decloux leaned over and said to me “this is three hours and twelve minutes long.” Because even if this is shot in a relentlessly slick, trailer-ready fashion, almost nothing interesting or exciting happens as Raya swans about, sleeping with a couple of different women and engaging in minor gang intrigue. It’s extremely telling that the trailer that got me interested in seeing this is only the first action sequence, because once you’ve seen that, you’ve seen basically every trick this movie has.
Stunt choreographer J.J Perry pulls a lot from his work on John Wick, but it’s flat and uninspired because Wick is constantly getting hurt, which Yash will not allow! Even in the fight he loses, he technically wins it first, only losing it because he won’t kill his opponent!
And that entire fight’s a cheat, anyway, because the film, after noodling around pointlessly for over two hours descends into complete incoherence. The climax doesn’t work on any level, as flails around attempting to claw back any of the pathos that was clearly intended at the script stage (assuming it had one.)
Toxic is an absolutely demoralising time at the cinema. A pounding, miserable exercise in ego and hubris. For once, Indian reviewers–famously harsh–were absolutely justified in their vitriol.
(Not least because I suspect that at least a number of establishing shots in this are AI slop, which gave me some pause on covering it at all. I certainly didn’t know going in, but consider it yet another reason to not even think about watching this.)
Now, technically the film does try and make this look a bit ambiguous, the car slides off the cliff because it’s raining or whatever, but not until later! ↩︎
Although the production was obviously so troubled, and Yash must be so clearly impossible to work with, god knows what she actually got to do. ↩︎
No one needs another lengthy essay on The Odyssey… is something I’m sure students have been saying since around the 3rd century BC, but, well, here I am. To be honest, the discourse around Nolan’s attempt to grapple with one of the oldest surviving works of literature has done nothing but depress me. We started with a chud revolt over the perceived “realism” of people of colour in a work that features cyclopes and witches, and as soon as the film was released–and was tremendously successful–the war of consensus began, where fandom (as it tends to) rushed to defend a work from any and all criticism, aggrieved over the idea that an interpretation might be interpreted itself and seen wanting.
Both wars, of course, are a disturbing continuation of the rejection of critical thinking and experts1. It is ironic, I think, that it should be considered unacceptable for an adaptation of a work that has been debated since at least the time of Plato to be criticised by a classicist (Emily Wilson) who has translated The Odyssey once (and in the process of doing so again) because she wasn’t sufficiently courteous. That she dared to write with a little zing and took a little pleasure in a takedown. The edges of everything must be sanded off, every bite must be palatable, give us nothing to chew on, let our teeth become vestigial.
Perhaps the most has been made of Wilson saying that she’d be “ashamed to have written any part” of The Odyssey, which I (personally) can’t completely sign off on. But I would have been ashamed to have written the many, many times characters in The Odyssey drop thudding clumps of exposition, or just straight up say the themes of the movie out loud. “Our civilisation is collapsing” characters say with the kind of tone you might have if you were blandly noting a restaurant you never saw anyone in was closing down.
Consider: Christopher Nolan finally gives a woman close to a decent role with Penelope, a woman trapped behind a veil, fighting for stalemate. Anne Hathaway does what she can, but we never get to sense Penelope’s frustration with sitting next to an empty throne as little more than a prize; she instead screams almost directly into the camera that her abilities are worth less than the hair on a man’s chin, obliterating what was hardly very subtle to begin with. Of course, this is all conveniently forgotten as soon as Odysseus returns, heavily bearded, to take said throne, Penelope reduced to a weeping damsel.2
Indeed, what stands out about Nolan’s Odyssey–outside of his own preoccupations, which really colour every part of the film–is how much the original text’s ambiguities have been flattened into the Hollywood paste. Honestly, I’m surprised. Every addition is intended to make the work go down smoother yet diminishes it. Robert Pattinson’s isn’t just a dick who is abusing xenia (described as “Zeus’s Law” in the film, a patronising simplification3) but actually a shameful draft dodger. Agamemnon becomes Darth Vader (albeit one where George Lucas let David Prowse voice him) willing to kill his child in order to secure… trade routes. Fucking trade routes!!! I’m sorry, George!!!
These elaborate back stories, added to show why characters are baddies or goodies, so we can boo them or cheer them on at the appropriate moments are just thematically confusing if you think about them too long (war is bad… but draft dodging is also bad…) The Odyssey is practically a direct sequel (well, prequel) to Oppenheimer and Nolan, obsessed with the idea of what great men must do, what it costs them, and what these fated actions mean for the future, ties himself in knots.
In many ways, The Odyssey’s sins begin with Sinon. We’re getting several layers of irony deep (here based on the pronunciation of Sinon) but as much as the decision to include a thread from the Aeneid, Roman poet Virgil’s epic that sees Odysseus as a duplicitous baddie could be seen as an attempt to offer balance, it really just sets up Nolan’s Odyssey as another paean to the feelings of the oppressor.
It is important, I think, that although in Nolan’s Odyssey we do get a single Trojan character, they are a symbol, not an embodied actor in the story, and that every enemy soldier is faceless. Because it speaks to that focus.
If Nolan was interested in a wider view of the Trojan War, it seems strange that he used the Aeneid rather than The Iliad. Let’s put aside the question of authorship (which gets especially thorny with the section of The Iliad I’m going to discuss) but why not use the Doloneia as an example of Odysseus’s sins? Odysseus commits an act of espionage, captures a (terrified) scout, extracts information at the promise of their survival, and then lets his companion execute them.
It possible that Nolan is just such a dork that he doesn’t believe that section belongs in the Iliad, but this one-sided concentration on Odysseus’ feelings above all–we see the sack of Troy reflected in his sad eyes almost exclusively–has an awkward fit that lives (as Nolan’s far more conservative Batman movies did) in the aftermath of a war on terror built on lies big and small, and now during the continued genocide of the Palestinian people and the morass of a war with Iran. In these wars it is not honest regret that is shared, but consent manufactured. Think of the sadness in the eyes of Israeli soldiers, depressed about shooting children’s legs off because it took them away from rifling through women’s underwear drawers.
It’s sad, they say, because you made us do it to you.4
But alright. Odysseus’ sin has to be lying for the “right” reasons; he is the hero after all. But isn’t it just so neat for a man, broken by his realisation that his abuse of xenia via the Trojan Horse apparently the original sin of the bronze age5 can come home and… kill everyone in his house for abusing xenia? While I understand the ending of the original Odyssey is hardly going to satisfy a modern audience (the families of the slaughtered show up to kill Odysseus and Athena appears and goes “listen guys, they were dicks. Let it go”) the themes collapse into anticlimax.
Ultimately, Nolan has latched onto xenia as a theme and made what I can only describe as a “Liberal boomer doomer” movie. A film that says “Modern civilisation is ending because we stopped having the neighbours over for dinner.”
“We’ll die soon enough, though, so hopefully the next generation (Tom Holland in a headband) can sort it out. Bye!”
This is, frankly, the kind of message I would be ashamed to put my name behind, so maybe I do fully agree with Wilson. It reminds me of the similarly feeble “maybe the kids will sort it out” denouement of One Battle After Another (though at least without that film’s smug detachment.) I just don’t think it’s that meaningful to be telling stories where the takeaway is “oh shit… damn… yeah… I guess that sucks. Oh well, what are you going to do?” in the face of climate and societal collapse.
In each of our homes, we live with suitors we seem powerless to evict. No longer embodied in our space, but making a banquet of our wealth remotely. They lay us off and take huge bonuses. They raise prices on our groceries and pocket the difference. They rip the wire from the walls of the stores on our high streets and then, once they’ve taken everything they can, leave them boarded up and empty. They hollow out everything we used to have, our third spaces, our communities, our environment, our homes, because they think it is their right to take what we have.
The rage we should feel is legitimate. The decades we have been at sea while this has happened should not have dulled it, no lotus flowers, no siren songs should be enough. If we’re on the beach, I want us to start building the raft, and it’s not to sail off into the sunset.
I’m not asking The Odyssey to be a polemic, but it’s depressing to see Nolan attempt to grapple with big themes using an icon of the Western canon and devolve into the easy non-answer of the Hollywood ending.
Look. If you really ask me to take it as it is, to put up with it being thematically muddled and full of blatant exposition it’s… fine. The design of the palace–with a physical screen used as a “veil” I thought was clever. The body horror section was intriguingly unusual for Nolan (and goes on so much longer than you expect). Leguizamo better be picking up some statues (to make up for all the ones he didn’t get for his role as The Pest). The redrafting of Odysseus revealing his identity to Telemachus until he saw his dog worked for me (I’m not made of stone.) Pattinson enjoys himself, and I enjoy that he’s enjoying himself. But that fight at the end is absolutely garbage and probably more embarrassing than anything else. Come on Nolan, you don’t want to hire anyone who can choreograph and shoot action? No?
In the end, The Odyssey is more interesting in what it says about Nolan than what it says about The Odyssey, though the discourse on that is, hopefully, not going to last another three thousand years. I apologise for adding to it, but you know what Athena’s like, always inspiring us to battle. Well… actually, if you’ve only seen The Odyssey you don’t know what she’s like.
Of which I am not one. I’m just some prick waffling online, so if this article annoys you, consider it a learning experience where you can go “well, I didn’t agree with that” and move on with your life. ↩︎
I say “close” to a decent role, because Nolan removes two things that enrich Penelope’s character. Her dream, which expresses complicated, ambiguous feelings about Odysseus’s return, and her later test of Odysseus. I think Nolan plays the idea that Penelope clocks Odysseus early well, but it’s sad that she doesn’t get a grace note showing that maybe she’s the clever one. ↩︎
As an aside–it’s frustrating that the main (only?) explanation of xenia given is that it’s done in case a guest is a god in disguise (especially as the gods are not, exactly, seen here.) While that’s true, it’s much more interesting as a symptom of the currency-free palace economies that The Odyssey represents, where visitors would often have little to barter with; without it, travel and diplomacy would be near impossible, it was reciprocal, and it was not just given in fear of divine punishment. ↩︎
Consider Helen, given a miserable fate here yet still explicitly taking the blame. ↩︎
I mean technically in the source Paris abducted Helen while he was a guest of Menelaus, itself breaking xenia. Sorry if I’m getting too into the weeds here but “yeah but I did it via the form of a big wooden horse” doesn’t seem like that big a step up unless, like Nolan, you’re attracted to the idea that “wooden horse” equals “nuclear weapons”. [“Who’s making the gross simplifications now?”–Ed.] ↩︎
The Mandalorian And Grogu is a movie that seems to be at cross-purposes with itself. If you look at the marketing’s styling and the source material (by which I mean the show, rather than Star Wars writ large) it seems obvious that The Mandalorian And Grogu is not supposed to be a huge, tentpole piece of summer cinema; it’s really meant to be a charming throwback to the era of film serials (indeed the very film serials that Star Wars was inspired by the first place).
Sure, maybe it’s a bit more like the later period of features like the Zatoichi series or (if you’re feeling especially uncharitable) luchador films, but the idea is: you’re going to show up to see a movie starring “those characters you like” have a sort of inconsequential and probably formulaic adventure, but because you saw “those characters that you like” doing the stuff you like seeing them do, you’ve had a good time.
It’s not a horrible idea, except for the fact that they made a huge deal about seeing The Mandalorian And Grogu in IMAX, the film cost $165 million dollars, and serials succeeded because the cinema was the only place you could see those characters that you like and we’re all already accustomed to seeing the Mandalorian and Grogu have low-stakes adventures at home. There better be something pretty special if I’m going out and paying the ridiculous IMAX surcharge to see it!!!
There is not.
I’ll say up front: I wanted to like this. A major issue with The Mandalorian as a show is the seeming terror Disney has had in, you know, committing to anything featuring major character development post The Last Jedi. Were you moved when Mando delivered Baby Yoda to Luke Skywalker1? Well, Disney definitely felt that you couldn’t bear to see them apart so desperately that they had to reunite them immediately… in a spin-off! I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I imagined that if they were making a film, it was because they really had something they wanted to make. They had some clear, concrete idea at hand.
They did not.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a film as devoid of a thesis as this one in a long time. If you’re really reaching, it’s something about fatherhood? Rotta “Stinky” The Hutt bangs on about his bad father enough. Maybe it’s about children growing and coming into their own? Maybe? There’s no reason for me to be reaching this hard, no one making The Mandalorian And Grogu did. It’s incredibly clear no one was originally thinking “oh let’s make a charming throwback to film serials.” They were thinking “we need to get something, anything in theatres to keep the franchise warm.” A transparent act of desperation, and it’s all over the movie. Stinky’s second speech about his dad repeats so fully what he said in his first that it’s one of the clearest signifiers that this was obviously originally a season of TV, reading as it does “well, you probably forgot what he said last week.”
It’s not that there aren’t fun concepts here. I, on paper, like that the first proper chunk of the film is going for a noir, detective story vibe, but it ends with the (masked) Mando being knocked out with poison gas. Uh, ok. Later, I like the idea of Grogu having to come into his own. But that ends with him being given a magic potion by a random character. Very meaningful!
Every beat that could lead somewhere meaningful is frittered away to nothing, and instead we get the exact thing that killed things like Solo: a relentless urge to show us Star Wars shit we recognize. Or are supposed to recognize. A guy from Star Wars Rebels is there and I guess we’re supposed to be losing our minds, but I don’t really know who that is. An arena battle happens… and it’s just like the holochess from the Millennium Falcon. I know what that is, but I don’t care, and I don’t need to see it!!!2
This shit sucks, man. Here’s something that actually is cool that they did: getting Phill Tippett, who worked on the original holochess sequence, to create Chekhov’s cool new robots for a later stop-motion sequence. Now that I like!
Except for the fact that Jon Favreau can’t shoot action for shit. In every sequence I basically had no idea what was going on. It’s a neat idea to try and do a Hong Kong-action style bar fight, for example, but the only part of the action I could follow was noticing when dudes tried to punch a guy wearing a Mandalorian helmet in the face. That’s going to hurt! It doesn’t make sense even in the moment!
Every action sequence from the opening sequence also suffers from another major issue, which I call the “this seems very dangerous for a baby to be at” problem. The solution they came up with was “just make the baby disappear for most of the shots” and I gotta say… It doesn’t work.
If TV didn’t exist, they were banging one of these out every year or six months, and going to the cinema cost a nickel, then sure, this would be fine. But in 2026 this is symbolic of the fact that they just gotta put Star Wars to bed. Make me want to revisit this world. Before The Mandalorian And Grogu was over I was desperate to leave it.
It’d be easy to dismiss this film as dadslop, and don’t get me wrong, it absolutely is dadslop, but really F1 is an exercise in reputation-washing; for F1, which itself only seems to exist to sportswash, and for Brad Pitt, who after abuse allegations needed a movie that portrayed him as the coolest man who ever lived.
It is absurd (though sadly due to the crushing length and absolute tedium of most of this film, never hilarious) the lengths this movie goes to to make Brad Pitt seem cool. Obviously, there are articles on the “charm offensive” that Pitt has undertaken, but this movie has the mania of a low-budget vanity project that just happened to cost hundreds of million dollars. You cannot watch this film and not see a man who seems to be willing himself to be the reincarnation of Robert Redford even though at the time of filming he wasn’t dead yet. If you told me Pitt was doing weird demonic rituals, burning frames from The Natural in the middle of a pentagram, snorting them, mixing them with his blood, crying, screaming, “make me Robert Redford but cooler” I’d shrug and go “seems believable.”
You could say I’m beating up on Pitt a bit too much here; after all Tom Cruise has been playing the greatest man who ever lived in every movie he’s made for years now, and his closets will almost certainly spring open one day with a comedy “BOI-O-OING” noise and shower everyone with a Paris Catacombs. But (bar the last) those movies seemed to still be genuinely engaged with entertaining, whereas F1 seems like it only sprung into existence because someone at Apple collated user data and worked out that F1 had a cross-cultural synergy across age groups when paired with X established actor and blah blah blah fucking blah.
Despite being pointlessly bloated, you almost have to respect F1’s monomania. Sure, the movie is like they grabbed sport movie clichés from a bag like Scrabble tiles and scattered them without care–the movie doesn’t even bother to feature an “evil” racing team of burly Swedes or something, and it really does miss them (a shot of Lewis Hamilton snarling doesn’t count)–but you can see that they needed to expend that effort on showing that in every situation Pitt’s character is not just right but unselfishly so. The other driver on the team he’s parachuted into hates him with the burning passion of a toddler who’s been told he has to let his brother get a shot on the steering wheel, and yet Pitt does nothing but work his arse off to elevate him. He gets (understandably) annoyed once, then immediately goes back to being a cool big brother who “lets him win”. The trad. “darkest before dawn” moment only comes because he’s just so damn angry on the team’s behalf. And the movie pulls an incredible “have your cake and eat it” move in the finale, where he wins the big final race because he was trying to selflessly not win it.
The movie drowns in hagiographic detail. There’s a section in this movie where Pitt’s character defends a member of the pit crew who made a mistake and then later gives her a pep talk; this character has basically nothing to do with anything else in the movie (indeed they have no character to speak of) and it immediately reminded me of the part of Tiger Schroff vehicle Heropanti 2 where he offers to help someone in a wheelchair who transparently doesn’t need help. You could cut this stuff!!! The movie is 155 minutes long!!!
I suppose your question at this point might be “well, is the driving any good?” and it’s… fine. Car go fast is good, obviously, though there’s not that much of it, because we need to hear from a lot of characters restating exposition instead, and as an Apple film they don’t want you to have to look up from your laundry too much anyway. And I did find the moment in the climax where we’re supposed to experience the transcendence of speed confusing because it really reads like Brad Pitt is about to die. Of course, the only way that would have happened in this movie would have been so he could meet god, who would be like “ah man, I can’t compete. You’re just so cool.”
exp. Is generally intended to be a video game website, but I like writing about film as well, so I think I can get away with celebrating my year in culture in general. Which I suppose makes it sound like I’m going to be sharing books and art shows I went to, but it’s just music and films and that, innit. I mean this is a video game website.
Single Of The Year: Hayley Williams – True Believer
Edge case here as this was, along with every other song on Hayley William’s Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, originally put online as a “single” but isn’t actually classed as a single on things like Wikipedia. But of course, such distinction is kind of meaningless these days. As I said on Bluesky, there are echoes of Chino Moreno’s ††† here, and I can’t help but loop it.
Album Of The Year: Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power
Probably wasn’t going to be anything else. I was shocked when I heard Deafhaven’s Infinite Granite, concerned they were making a full shift towards shoegaze the kind of which put me right off Alcest, but I’ll admit that album has grown on me. It almost makes me feel bad that I think of Lonely People With Power in that cliche fashion as “a return to form” but, well, it is.
“Evil Puddle argues … that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form.”
Interesting year for film. So many of the big award films this year were, frankly, absolute slogs, the worst kind of eating your greens. And here’s the bold Matt Farley embarrassing them with a shoestring budget and non-actors.
“War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.”
Yes, Sinners is good–excellent, in fact–and probably what I’d go for if I was looking for the “mainstream pick.” But it’s still a pretender to the masala throne; better to go straight to the source. There was no bigger or better movie for me this year than War 2.
(Note: if this trailer autoplays with a terrible English dub, please click through and change it to Hindi. Please.)
TV Of The Year (Runner Up): The Rehearsal Season 2
I was a latecomer to Nathan Fielder, but I think he’s probably this century’s greatest artist (at least so far) and I already believed that before seeing the second season of The Rehearsal. I saw some complaints that the first season was him repeating himself (Nathan For You’s Smokers Allowed/Finding Francis) but I think that was uncharitable: Fielder has been able to drill down on his artistic process (thanks, unrealistically huge amounts of money from HBO) and create the kind of work that changes the way people see the world. Simultaneously, there are things in this that are so funny it’s actually painful. I am in awe.
TV Of The Year: Andor Season 2
It was a close run thing, but Tony Gilroy’s ability to take Star Wars, probably the world’s biggest “IP” and owned by the most overpowering and surely risk-adverse cultural force today (Disney) and turn it into a genuinely meaningful examination of what it means to live under fascism? A show that’s willing to say the word genocide? Much like Twin Peaks: The Return, this was a TV experience of the likes I don’t think I’ll ever experience again, one which will stay with me forever.
In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Sam Rockwell stars as a man who claims to be from a future where AI has wiped out half the population and the other half live unable to escape their personal “perfect” AI realities. He takes a NORMS hostage with the belief that some combination of the restaurant’s diners will be able to reach the creator of the AI so they can install safeguards before it’s too late (the film, intelligently, accepts the inevitability of AI and has a sensibly scaled goal as a result.)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die–immediately–takes aim at our modern affliction: that we’re all looking at our phones, all the time. The satire feels a bit broad, with entire classrooms of students all just trapped in an endless scroll, and I’ve seen more than one sneery “ok boomer” take on this.
But.
Last year I worked background for a while on a TV show, which is a job I rather like; there’s a lot of downtime where you can do things like finishing editing that zine you were working on. I haven’t done it in years, and the one huge thing I noticed was that while there was still a small contingent of people who brought books, or wanted to chat with whoever they were sitting next to (whether they wanted to or not…) the largest cohort of people—who were of all ages—just looked at their phone. Now, I look at my phone a lot too, but I was taken by how the majority of them used it: on Instagram or Tiktok, scrolling at high speed, endlessly. Like they weren’t actually seeing anything. Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. For hours.
It looked exactly like it does in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
“Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the ‘machine zone,’ in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.”
Social media, as it currently exists, has been designed in exactly the same way slot machines have. It has been continuously and intentionally evolved, using every trick gambling designers have come up with (and more) to make sure people pick up their phone at the merest hint of boredom or discomfort. And now AI is here to make the skinner box even more personalised than the algorithm has already managed, with the ultimate goal that, eventually, you don’t put the phone down. Ever.
A perfect smooth-brained populace, circuses so good they don’t realise there’s no bread.
You might think I’m being histrionic, but addiction is a disease, and we now live in a climate of a designed disease. We’re all addicted—to varying levels—and we need to start treating it the same way we should be treating any addiction: by being hard on those who peddle the addictive substance, and treating the addicted with care and respect rather than punitive measures. And we need to wake up to this now, before it’s too late.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die get it.
It feels absurd for a Gore Verbinski movie to be the first thing I’ve seen outside of Adam Curtis documentaries to get it, but welcome to the resistance, I guess?
Don’t get me wrong. This is a big, fun, silly film. It’s trying to make its point by being entertaining, not preachy, and here’s none of the nihilism of a Black Mirror. It embarrasses Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a movie that seems like it’s trying to say something angry and real about the world we live in and manages to say nothing at all. And not only is it not a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise, it’s also not “new IP.” It’s just a movie, which is almost the most subversive thing about it.
It’s a little scattershot, could be a little shorter, Asim Chaudry’s accent is… not good. But it refuses to fall into some traps that might blunt it (there’s no “AI can be good if we just use it correctly” here) and frankly, I’d follow Sam Rockwell anywhere.
There’s not a lot of movies where I think “I hope a lot of people see this” but this is one of them, not least because it’s just a straight up enjoyable film. I admit I wrote this to post online, on a social network, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die chimed so much with my own experience that I now notice, just a little more, when I pick up my phone for what feels like no reason, and to then try and interrogate it.
Sure, the movie might only be mildly illuminating on the dangers of our encroaching, all encompassing “machine zone”, but sometimes a little extra light on the problem is all you need to actually see it.
I do not think the original Avatar is good, but I’ll be the first to admit that Way of Water had me both hootin’ and hollerin’ as I watched genocidal whiteys get murked, and I remember thinking “oh man, I enjoyed that enough I’d watch it again.”
[Monkey’s paw curls]
Did that mean I wanted to watch the exact same film again, but as a sequel? Because I did not.
Now, before you start quibbling here–there’s the fire Na’vi, multiple(!) whale councils, a fuckton more Spider, the climax which is whales vs. whalers again features more, bigger whales and even some squid too–I think I assumed that this film was going to, you know, not just feature the Sullys mostly hanging around and swimming in the same location of the previous movie. That there’d be some contrived reason for them to end up at a volcano, or among the fire Na’vi, and the film would be a feast of fire and particle effects the way Way of Water was for water physics.
No. In fact, the film does a hilarious thing where the Sullys have their contrived reason to leave the water Na’vi (“Unlike the audience, we don’t want Spider to die!”) and so they leave, get into complications on the way to their original settlement (literally due to the Fire Na’vi!) but within about twenty minutes they’re back with the water Na’vi.
What the hell?
The film does, briefly, go to a volcano so the OG antagonist Quaritch can enjoy a Far Cry 3 cutscene with the leader of the Fire Na’vi Varang, but we never learn anything meaningful about the Fire Na’vi or their motivations, they don’t do anything exciting (one guy Witness Me’s himself, so I thought that might be a thing, but he’s the only one that ever does it, so maybe he was just depressed or something) and Varang has them all move to the evil human settlement so she can be close to her boyfriend? I mean she basically tradwifes herself into irrelevance?
Fire And Ash is just so deeply unrewarding. Look, I’m not exactly hung up on the lore here or anything but the fact that the movie does absolutely nothing to move the overarching story forward feels like… a mistake. If you’re really reaching I guess there are some underwhelming revelations about Kiri and a glimpse of a big white rotating head (???) but I don’t get a sense of where that takes anything. And don’t get me wrong, I could watch whitey get killed in a variety of ways for hours, but it’s mostly the same stuff you’ve seen before, and the one death you’re waiting for–the evil whaling captain–is… nothing. You can’t have him get torn in half or something? At least if you do that he could come back with spider legs (come on, all together now [chanting] Spider legs! Spider legs! Spider legs!)
Speaking of Spiders… what was the deal here? James Cameron made a bet with George Lucas that he could make a human Jar Jar? I’m being unnecessary cruel to Jack Champion (it isn’t his fault) but it’s so weird to make your film about indigenous revolt that’s already about a white saviour end with every Na’vi in I guess all of history crowding round the one white guy that’s cool with them to say “congratulations!” like it’s Evangelion.
I’ve seen a few people say that they like this more than Way of Water, which… I mean, fine, I’d like to agree, but there’s even less narrative drive here. And even if Varang is hot or whatever (where are the thicc Na’vi tho? Am I right, fellas?) the fire dancing and ululation is wildly cringe no matter how desperately we’re all trying to pretend the allegory here has any distance at all.
If you’re “only” going to make five of these, and you’re 71, I don’t think you can piss an entire film and several years away on doing the same thing twice even if it’s still making bank in China and kept a lot of people in New Zealand employed.
*Sigh*
It’s weird that not only do I want these films to be good, I think they should be. “We should brutally kill the people who are making our planet uninhabitable. Like really fucking fuck them up. Real Drive elevator hours” is just the kind of message I can believe in, I guess, even with all this baggage.
Ah well, maybe next time. At least it still looked completely fucking stupid in high frame rate!
Something I’ll say for The Running Man: usually it’s annoying and pointless when a movie gets remade, but considering the original had almost no relation to Stephen King(“Richard Bachman”)’s novel, I can understand why someone might want to make a more faithful adaptation than the Schwarzenegger vehicle from 1987.
I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, and especially not in 2025. Even if The Running Man is completely new to you, in the last decades we’ve had so many variations on the concept, a few of which were legitimate cultural phenomena (The Hunger Games and especially Squid Game.) At this point, The Running Man wasn’t posed to ride the wave but paddle in its trough, and there’s no surprise that it hasn’t been able to keep its head above water.
It’d be nice, then, to say that it’s a great adaptation, has a unique spin, or is even that it’s just really fun and a great time at the movies. It would be nice to say that! But the Running Man offers no reason for its existence beyond the endemic lack of imagination in the executive class, who will dust off any old IP in the hope that it connects with the demographic the research claimed it would. I have a tremendous fondness for Edgar Wright, and I think it’s for that reason that this bummed me out so bad even after being burned by Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.
The Running Man’s issue is that it seems to have absolutely no consistent vision, like no one really tried to think what the world of the film is and what it represents, and no willingness to hold a comprehensible political position either. It’s a strange alternate reality where they’ve got drones and self-driving cars and streetlamps smell you but runners still have to… record things to tape and post them in, for the most popular TV show ever that must be incredibly boring to watch (seriously, what do they fill the time with each night? The tedious procedural work of the hunters?) Any attempt at this being a “Verhoeven-like satire” is smashed to pieces because you can’t satirise consumerism with products like “Fun Twinks” while also having product placement all over the film. It’s unbelievably grim to imagine a director who once walked away from Marvel over creative differences giving a thumbs up after shooting the umpteenth take of a Liquid Death commercial he was going to put directly in his film. Eurgh!!!
Everything is just so flat. Glen Powell might play the world’s angriest man, able to withstand a taser out of sheer rage (wish they’d done more with that) but they don’t seem to be able to find anything to do with that, and even cut my favourite humanising factor–that he’s one of the rare people who still likes to read books–so they can jam in more of a reality TV parody that makes no sense because it just looks exactly like normal reality TV and doesn’t seem to have any jokes. His first escape is on the money, but they can’t seem to build on it, and in fact, there’s really not much action at all (concerningly, this lines up quite well with Baby Driver, which similarly runs out of steam.) Michael Cera has a bit of fun (and you know what, I liked the subversion of expectations) but Powell doesn’t even do anything in that scene and the big climax is… a small explosion on a bridge. Thrilling.
The nadir has to be the ending. I think everyone accepts that no studio is going to shoot the ending as written, and to be honest, I’m surprised that Powell’s Ben Richards still holds a woman hostage (it feels very retro, though they speedrun getting her onside so no one has to feel icky for very long.) But the decision to do what they do is so wrong-headed and unsatisfying I almost can’t believe it. This is a movie that has three (three!) separate “you thought this happened but it didn’t” fake-outs, and to end on one is such a complete collapse of the contract between audience and filmmaker you should be able to get a refund, especially because the film tries to have its cake and eat it by offering the expected payback in the coda. The lack of politics really comes to bite the film in the arse. They shed almost all of the climate change stuff from the book, and the main antagonist, despite a game performance from Josh Brolin, has none of the bite of even one of the random people they found on the street to play the billionaire spectators in Squid Game. The film also seems to forget Colman Domingo is playing a baddie, because he escapes thanks to… his contract negotiation? Was something cut earlier in the film that would have had us emotionally invest in his character?
This movie even largely fails on the “it’s nice to look at Glasgow” scale, because while I popped when I saw the back of the Savoy Centre or whatever, most of this film is slathered in so much digital smear that it might as well have been shot in the Volume. I don’t mean to bang on about haptic cinema again but Christ we really need films to look real again.
Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione Released: 02/12/2025 Completed: 04/12/2025 Completion: Finished it.
“Artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support . . . works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.”
–Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a 1974 debate as quoted by Naomi Green in their essay “Salò: Breaking the Rules”.
Horses has been out for exactly a week, and I’m certain that if you’re reading this you’re already sick of the discourse (damn my adherence to schedule!) We actually raced through the talking points in record time, to be honest, it was barely a couple of days before we got the “well, you know, it’s actually not that good/what’s all the fuss about really” essays. Milking horses in real life is impractical and low-yield, and here we’ve reached the point where we’re drawing dust.
However, that doesn’t really change the material facts of the matter: irrespective of quality, Horses is an artistic work that has been de-facto banned from the two major storefronts–due to opaque processes and without recourse. I’ve written about this happening before–in fact this year–when Cara Cadaver’s VILE: Exhumed was banned from Steam (and then released for free) due to what appears to have been a misunderstanding of that game’s use of real footage as pornography and the wider context of morality policing by payment processors.
Interestingly, Santa Ragione are at pains to point out that this ban occurred in June 2023(!) and that it “has nothing to do with the recent restriction on adult content pushed by payment processors.”
There’s an urge to try and uncover the reasoning for the ban, but it’s to stumble about in the dark. Santa Ragione concentrate on–as much of the discourse has–that an unfinished sequence in a version “scrambled together” for early submission featuring a child riding on the back of a naked woman triggered the ban, but after the ban of VILE: Exhumed, I’m not so sure that (even benign) FMV footage or payment processors as a factor can’t entirely be ignored as, at least, a supplemental reason to keep the ban enforced. In particular with the ban from Epic, who didn’t choose to ban the game until December 1st(!) with the stated reason that they don’t sell AO rated games1 (despite Santa Ragione’s protestation that Horses had received PEGI 18 and ERSB M ratings) it smells to me like a simple pre-emptive decision to avoid controversy that could lather up into the kind of issue with payment processors that could affect their bottom line. It’s just easier.
So really, it’s not so much the specific reasoning for the ban that matters2, but the context: that we exist in a world where art not cannot exist without being a commodity–Santa Ragione cannot merely hope that people experience their art, but that they purchase it–and where wide access to that commodity is tied to an oligopoly (if we’re being kind to the Epic Games Store) or monopoly (if we’re not) who have absolute power over the market. It is satisfying to poke at the hypocrisies of a storefront like Steam, but it is, ultimately, a problem of capitalism.
If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’re probably sick of me saying things are capitalism’s fault. Well, they are, and the interesting thing about Horses is that this issue of commodification under the ultimate power of an opaque system is critiqued by the work itself. And this has echoes with another piece of Italian art which I have seen paid lip-service to in other essays on Horses: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom.
It is not easy to find a usable representative image of Salò, but this will do.
Pasolini is a complicated figure with a huge legacy, though one that has been somewhat narrowed in the popular imagination due to the reputation of Salò (his other transgressive works like Teorema don’t really get a look in) which, unfortunately, I’m not going to help. What’s important here is that Salò existed as a work contemporary to 1970s Italy, an era of intense political turmoil only “post-fascist” in so much that it came after the fall of both Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic (which forms the setting for Salò), and in a period where Pasolini was concerned with the “new facism” of neo-capitalism.
In an era where art is being flattened into a homogenous, global product, it is important to understand Santa Ragione as human creators whose cultural specificity does not necessarily line up with the enforced Western (American) default, and that is reflected in this era also obviously being of great importance to Santa Ragione. Their game Wheels of Aurelia–itself embroiled in a delisting controversy–is set in this period, and movies such as Il Sorpasso (1962) and Rabid Dogs (1974) clearly inspired it. There is no such clean line of inspiration between Salò and Horses but I see a continuation of thought between them.
The thing about Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom is that its reputation precedes it. Portraying, as it does, the the torture, rape and murder of teenage victims by four powerful fascists and their collaborators, it generally features high on not just “most scary” and “most disturbing” lists but “movies you should never watch” lists, and continues to be banned in some countries. But if taken merely as a series of images, in 2025 it really isn’t… that bad. Would it be able to feature on the Criterion Collection if it was? I’m not so sure. Watching it now, you wonder what Pasolini would have made of the internet, and in particular the sea of easily accessible pornography where you can see the participants of things that the fascists of Salò could not perceive. If Salò was to rage against the idea that fascist dehumanisation was being continued via the commodification of the body and ultimately captures the mind, what would he make of the masses willingly3 performing online what was once considered unwatchable? More disturbing things are streamed online from bedrooms in middle America than we ever see in Salò. Indeed, in Salò Pasolini uses a cold, distant gaze to implicate us; could he have perceived a future where not just the camera is drawn so close, but the audience can tip to push things ever further?
But what sets Salò apart is that it is not titillating4. It is not intended to excite, even shock seems like a side-effect. In fact, it was an attempt to create a work that was indigestible.
“I told myself: I have to react and make products that are as inconsumable as possible. I know it’s utopian, because everything ends up being consumed. At the same time, I know that there is something inconsumable in art, and we need to stress the inconsumable quality of art. Therefore, with all my forces, I will try and produce difficult and indigestible works.”
Horses is a cinematic game–in that it directly and intentionally references the form of surrealist cinema (which notably, is distinct from Pasolini’s style.) It’s in black and white; almost completely silent (using intertitles for dialogue) and features the continuous sound of a projector. Combined with the farm setting, the game feels like it is set somewhere within Mussolini’s reign, but like Salò, there are anachronistic elements (though they are more apparent: a VHS tape, for example.)
The player takes the role of Anselmo, sent to spend two weeks at a farm to learn the meaning of work. We know nothing about Anselmo–we don’t even know if he knows what’s going on at the farm before he gets there, though he seems unhappy about the prospect of working there either way. The farm–as you certainly know by now–is run by a disturbed farmer who keeps a group of men and women as “horses” by drugging them and locking horse masks onto them. He is supported in this by his “dog”, Fido, similarly a man in a dog mask, and then you, the player as Anselmo, as you do video game farming tasks for him: picking carrots, feeding the dog, chopping wood, before you become increasingly entwined in the control of the “horses.”
As I said above, I do not believe Salò is intended as a direct inspiration, but there are parallels. The first that will come to mind is a sequence in Salò where the victims are treated as dogs, one of whom is harshly beaten when he does not cooperate (although this is a short, stand-alone sequence rather than the victims’ continual state.) More is the parallel of Salò’s men of power: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, who have their parallels in the game’s farmer, businessman, vet and priest. I think it’s unlikely the analogue was intended–the characters are much less deeply intertwined in Horses–but their inclusion as symbols of fascist systems cannot be overlooked.
“This technique is not meant to expel meaning. Rather, it creates a sense of ambiguity in which meaning is not directly signified and is therefore suspended, refusing to provide the viewer with easily digestible symbols … Rather than producing art with the intention of manipulating consumers through predictable emotional patterns and easily understandable symbols, suspended meaning challenges easy digestibility by introducing deliberately indigestible elements to the work.”
Although I think Horses is widely accepted as a narrative game, I think Horses intended “tactic” is to introduce a game with the signifiers and mechanics of the “farming” genre, which runs the breadth of Stardew Valley to Farming Simulator, in order to maximise the impact of its indigestible symbols. The game implies that it has a daily schedule design with tasks to check off, but discards and warps that at will almost immediately, creating something that frustrates and disconcerts as much as the setting.
And Horses does not–cannot–rely on the dispassionate extremity of Salò to be indigestible. If in Salò we must look directly at the human body, abused, in Horses we must look directly at the uncanny valley, itself a desecration of the human form. There’s been criticism of how goofy a game with such heavy themes looks, but the grotesque puppetry of the horses makes a mockery of them and is as symbolic of their devaluation and dehumanisation.
As an indigestible work I think Horses, like Salò, frustrates. Indeed, it makes me question the suitability of linear narrative video games for it unless designers are willing to push the form further. In cinema, the audience is implicated by their gaze; in games, the player is implicated by their play. Even in a film as indigestible as Salò, we debate and try to bargain with it, hopelessly. Why don’t they refuse? Why don’t they rise up? The film’s only glimpse of a kind of resistance that shakes the fascist’s power comes from a collaborator and only after we’ve seen a succession of the weakest characters turn on each other to save their skin–despite the fact that they are living through something unbearable. Film is very good at making us feel helpless, because there, we are. But games are almost all empowerment fantasies, and the ones that try to break us down so often offer us only the alternative of “the only way to win is not to play” rather than make us collaborators so we can continue even if in misery.
As Anselmo, we must play along whether we want to or not. Every player certainly thinks “well, I’d just leave” but… they can’t. The gate is closed, and there is no escape. Whether or not the stakes for Anselmo exist, at first we don’t feel them without the ability to truly test them. If Anselmo isn’t allowed to escape, let me try. I’ll reload. If Anselmo can walk off the farm whenever he likes, let him. I’ll do it. Make me collaborate, don’t force me to.
The strange thing is, at its best, Horses does engage with this issue head on. Later in the game, your position as collaborator cemented, a horse will not cooperate. The farmer’s dog gives you an option of how to deal with the horse: to offer, as the cliché goes, the carrot or the stick. Each carrot you offer returns no cooperation and leads to the stick becoming bigger and more dangerous, and the dog angrier. I found myself pleading for the horse to just cooperate, because I knew the next thing I would have to do was beat it.
Whether or not I truly had a choice over that doesn’t matter, because I willingly gave those carrots. Horses made me not just perform the act of collaboration, but embody it, and it made me feel shame in a way the early game’s railroading does not.
The scene that has received the most commentary however is the scene that Santa Ragione believes caused all the trouble and where Horses shows its hand: when the businessman’s5 daughter makes it clear that no one is under any illusions about what the horses are, and that the horses are people who represent a threat to the system.
I think you could argue that this represents a flaw in my argument that Horses is indigestible art; after all, if you spell it out this clearly, isn’t that quite… understandable? But under that criteria, Salò would also fail for making its setting explicit. Even in Salò the victims are not random (one is notably called out as from a “family of subversives.”) But to return to Schalk: “the technique is not meant to expel meaning.”
The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture.
I chafe at every mention that Horses is “like an A24 horror” considering the formulaic nature of “elevated horror.” I wrote earlier that I wondered what Pasolini would make of modern pornography; I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the Netflixication of cinema, work designed to go down so smoothly you don’t have to engage with it at all. We seemed to have crossed a rubicon where it’s not even that mass culture is inauthentic; it no longer seems to actually exist. The audience is so captured by capital they create viewing numbers to maintain a stock price while themselves receiving no value; a subscription to white noise to fold laundry to.
In this sphere, the value of Horses is that it must be engaged with, and it is ultimately that which makes it a threat to the hegemony of capital. At its best it does not just see the danger of commodification on our body and mind: it makes us feel it, perform it, and, ashamed, intend to refuse it.
Salò was not banned because of shock value alone. It may be an extreme example, but it suffered extra scrutiny for the same reason works as benign as To Kill A Mockingbird: an audience roused out of its slumber is a dangerous one. In 1975 Pasolini saw a world where the audience had to choke on the indigestible to wake. Horses may be more obvious, more on-the-nose in narrative by interactivity, but in doing so it takes the indigestible and asks the audience to not just wake from choking on it, but to spit it out.
You may think I’m giving Horses too much credit here–or implying conspiracy in its banning. But the same way that audiences are enveloped by the miasma of capitalism, companies like Steam and Epic are unconsciously risk averse in protection of the numbers. Santa Ragione focuses on the possibility that a little girl riding a naked woman was the reason for the ban; but I wonder if they’ve considered it was what she said that was. That she gave the game away.
“Each of us is a cog in the machine; we must all do our duty so society can function properly. So dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone.”
Will I ever play it again? I’ve already spit it out.
Final Thought: If I find one flaw in my argument, it is that Horses ultimately concludes in a very “video gamey” way. Pasolini famously struggled with the ending of Salò, ending on an abrupt non sequitur after taking things as far as they can go. Horses instead asks the player to engage with an actual puzzle (which comes as a surprise; the solution is also a little vague in game, meaning I can imagine a lot of players get stuck here, and I personally found it annoying to the point of it breaking immersion). It leads to heroic rescue and ultimately escape–one which implies reclamation and reconciliation. Depending on your viewpoint, this hopeful ending either continues the themes as a call to action for the awakened viewer or the kind of satisfying resolution that allows a return to slumber; the indigestible made digestible. The question is, I suppose, as always, what you are willing to swallow.
It has been mocked elsewhere but that this rule has an explicit carve out for crypto (“the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology”) is toe-curlingly embarrassing. ↩︎
Although after saying all of that I have to also attach Paolo Pedercini’s idea that it might relate to the fact that by just being called “Horses” it contaminates searches to a genre that horse-mad weans would be looking up, like if you called a game “tractors” and it was all about tractors with big floppy dongs flopping about. Hang on, let me get on the asset store… ↩︎
I should say supposedly willing here to be specific, but I don’t want to get too far afield of my main point in the moment. I touch on this in my essay on VILE: Exhumed, but there is an irony in that in Salò we can see a crying victim be debased with awareness that the shoot was actually pretty jolly, full of football games and risotto meals, but you really have no way to judge if in even vanilla pornography the performers are willing participants, as capitalism is always a coercive element. ↩︎
I would argue it is titillating, intentionally, until the rules are inverted at the villa, but again, I’m in danger of getting lost in the weeds here. ↩︎
This character is never referred to as such, and is a designation I’ve made on the statements of his daughter: “My father makes sure that [the farmer’s] business opportunities keep growing.” ↩︎
