Cat's Game
2021 · 10m
Directed by Josh Taube
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
An isolated man keeps a dark secret in his basement, and it is only a matter of time before it gets out.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a basement-secret thriller that reads like a dozen others—the premise alone tells you the whole film, and there's nothing here subverting the genre or making you say 'wait, WHAT?' It's competent, but competent doesn't move the needle.
A tidy exercise in tension, but it lands squarely in a well-worn thriller tradition without the formal ambition or restraint that would make it linger; the craft is assured, yet it doesn't quite earn its place in a lineage worth arguing about.
What saves Cat's Game from being rote is the sound design—the way Taube uses silence and muffled ambient noise to collapse the distance between basement and surface, making you feel the pressure of the secret before the reveal; that single choice transforms isolation into something visceral.