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Plot

Nicholas Van Orton is a divorced investment banker in San Francisco. He is haunted by the death of his father, who committed suicide on his 48th birthday by jumping off the roof of the family mansion. For his 48th birthday, Nicholas's estranged younger brother, Conrad, gives him an unusual present: a voucher for a game offered by Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Nicholas goes to the CRS office and takes a series of examinations. To his irritation, he is informed that his application has been rejected.

Nicholas returns home to find a wooden clown in his driveway. The news anchor talks to him through his TV screen, saying he is being watched by a camera in the clown's head, and gives him the number for a CRS 24-hour emergency hotline. He warns Nicholas not to call the hotline asking about the object of the game, as "figuring that out is the object".

Nicholas receives a note telling him to follow a waitress, Christine. When she helps a sick man in the street, they ride in the ambulance with him together. In the parking lot, the power is cut and everyone leaves suddenly. Nicholas and Christine escape the building and are chased by dogs through the streets. Afterwards, Christine tells Nicholas she was bribed to attract his attention.

A panic-stricken Conrad visits Nicholas and apologizes, claiming CRS has attacked him. When Conrad finds CRS keys in Nicholas's car, he accuses him of working for them and runs away. Nicholas abandons the car and gets in a taxi. The driver locks the doors, jumps out of the car and sends it into San Francisco Bay. Nicholas escapes using a tool left for him a day before. He goes to the police, but they find the CRS office abandoned.

Nicholas finds Christine's home and discovers everything in it is fabricated. When she tells him they are being watched, Nicholas attacks a camera and armed personnel swarm the house. Nicholas and Christine flee to a Van Orton home outside of the city. Christine tells Nicholas that CRS has drained his bank accounts by guessing his passwords using the psychological tests he completed, but when Nicholas calls his lawyer, he tells him his money is intact. Nicholas realizes Christine has drugged him. As he loses consciousness, she admits she is part of the scam and says he made a fatal mistake in giving his banking code over the phone.

Nicholas wakes entombed in a Mexican cemetery. He sells his watch to return to San Francisco, and finds his mansion foreclosed and most of his possessions removed. He contacts the hotel where Conrad was staying, and is told he has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. Nicholas retrieves a hidden gun from his home and finds his ex-wife to ask for help and apologize for his neglect. He recognizes Jim Feingold, the CRS employee who conducted his tests, in a television commercial and realizes he is an actor. He finds Jim and forces him to take him to the real CRS office. There, he takes Christine hostage, demanding to see the head of CRS.

Pursued by CRS guards, Nicholas takes Christine to the roof. Christine frantically tells him it is only a game: his finances are intact, and his family and friends are waiting on the other side of the door. When the door opens, Nicholas shoots the first person to emerge: Conrad, bearing a bottle of champagne. Nicholas tries to commit suicide by leaping off the roof, but lands on a giant air cushion in a banquet hall. He is greeted by Conrad and the rest of the actors from the game. Everything was staged for Nicholas's birthday present. After the party, Christine, whose real name is Claire, leaves for her next job and invites Nicholas for coffee at the airport.

Filming

Principal photography began on location in San Francisco in August 1996 despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles, which was cheaper. Fincher also considered shooting in Chicago and Seattle, but Chicago had no mansions nearby, and Seattle did not have an adequate financial district. The script had been written with San Francisco in mind, and he liked the financial district's "old money, Wall Street vibe". However, that area of the city was very busy and hard to move around in. The production shot on weekends to have more control. Fincher used old stone buildings, small streets, and the city's hills to represent the class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, he set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and red leather. Some of the locations used in the film included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio of San Francisco, and the historic Filoli Mansion, which is 40 kilometres (25 mi) south of San Francisco in Woodside, California and stood in for the Van Orton mansion.

For the visual look of Nicholas' wealthy lifestyle, Fincher and the film's cinematographer Harris Savides wanted to create a "rich and supple" feel, drawing inspiration from films like The Godfather, which featured visually appealing locations with ominous undertones. Once Nicholas left his protected world, Fincher and Savides let fluorescents, neon signs, and other background lights become overexposed to let "things get a bit wilder out in the real world." For The Game, Fincher used a Technicolor printing process called ENR, which gave the night sequences a smoother look. The challenge for him was to determine how much deception the audience could handle and whether they would "go for 45 minutes of red herrings". To address this, he staged scenes as simply as possible and used a single camera because "with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage".

Principal photography lasted 100 days, with much of the shooting done at night at various locations. The scene in which Nicholas' taxi drives into the San Francisco Bay was shot near the Embarcadero. The close-up of Douglas trapped in the back seat was filmed on a soundstage at Sony Pictures Studios in a large water tank. Douglas was in a small compartment that was designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi, with three cameras capturing the action.

Critical response

Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 77% based on 64 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The ending could use a little work but this is otherwise another sterling example of David Fincher's iron grip on atmosphere and storytelling." Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, praising Douglas as "the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change." In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times."

Time magazine's Richard Corliss wrote, "Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while, the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall)." In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "It's formulaic, yet edgy. It's predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste. But there's much pleasure in Fincher's intricate color schemes, his rich sense of decor, his ability to sustain suspense over long periods of time and his sense of humor." Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B+" rating, and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game—can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?!—but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact."

In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle wrote, "At times The Game is frustrating to watch, but that's just a measure of how well Fincher succeeds in putting us in his hero's shoes." However, Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers felt that "Fincher's effort to cover up the plot holes is all the more noticeable for being strained...The Game has a sunny, redemptive side that ill suits Fincher and ill serves audiences that share his former affinity for loose ends hauntingly left untied."

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