Crew
Director – Howard J. Ford, Screenplay – Cary Grant & Niall Johnson, Story/Producer – Tom George, Photography – Louie B. Collins, Music – Imran Ahmad, Visual Effects – David Tatchell, Makeup Effects – Lauren Grant & Max Van De Banks, Production Design – John Paul Frazer. Production Company – Happy Hour Productions/JG Bits Productions/Principal Film Finance.
Cast
Ed Westwick (Ben Jacobs), Andrew P. Stephen (The Presenter), Natalia Tsvetkova (Katia Volkova), Rory Alexander (Parker Green), Ricki Yale (Larch), Rose Reynolds (Lisa Jacobs), Lola Wayne (Kathy Burnett), Andrew Ofoegbu (Captain Larson), Andrew McGillan (Sasha Morgan), Mark Danbury (Agent Jackson), Miztli Rose (Esparza), Polina Nioly (Amy), Joe Urquhart (Sam Clark), Joseph Tweesdale (Alex), Eamonn Fleming (Ray), Natasha Skutka (Chloe Demaine), Sophie Rankin (Fay), Caterina Gabinella (Sofia Romana), Jack Stacey (William Elise)
Plot
Police detective Ben Jacobs of the Cybercrime unit of the Portland police department is obsessed with tracking down an internet broadcast called Russian Roulette where viewers bet on seeing people tortured and killed. Divorcee Katia Volkova, a Russian immigrant to the US, is abducted after work and becomes the latest person to be featured on Russian Roulette.
British director Howard J. Ford has made a modest if largely unrecognised body of films, beginning with the quite good The Dead (2010), a zombie film set in Africa. He and his brother Jonathan co-directed a decent sequel The Dead 2: India (2013). On his own, Howard went on to make the likes of the thriller Never Let Go (2015), the children’s film Adventure Boyz (2019), The Lockdown Hauntings (2021), the prison escape film Escape (2023), The Ledge (2022) about a woman facing killers on a mountainside, the cannibal film River of Blood (2024) and the monster movie Bone Keeper (2026).
The idea of the snuff internet site where people are imprisoned and either tortured has featured in various films with the likes of My Little Eye (2002), Untraceable (2008), The Den (2013), Killers (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). There is another whole series of films where people are forced to participate in gladiatorial combat or death hunts that are livestreamed with The Condemned (2007) through to the likes of Darkweb (2016) and Hunted (2020).
The script for Darkgame comes from Niall Johnson, the director of Keeping Mum (2005), and Cary Grant! (presumably not the Cary Grant who died in 1986, well before livestreams let alone the internet was ever a thing). It is also a script that gives the impression that neither writer knows anything about how the internet and/or how cybercrime operates in the US.
For one, the film has the Russian Roulette site being tracked by the cybercrime unit of the Portland Police Department, when in fact in the US, cybercrime is something that is dealt with by the FBI and Homeland Security. It seems absurd to have a local police department tracking people responsible for a snuff internet site when such a site would be hiding itself anonymously and there would be no clear indication, at least until victims are identified, that it is local in nature and not something operating internationally. The moment it crosses state borders it would become an FBI matter. On the other hand, in that nobody in the film ever seems to broadcasting via the darkweb and that everything is going out across the Clearnet, maybe it being a local police matter is not that far-fetched after all. In which case, why didn’t the police just identify the ip and track the site’s owners?
I have followed Howard J. Ford’s career with interest and he has made some solid films to date – The Dead films and The Ledge. Darkgame feels like Ford’s worst film to date, ranking somewhere down there co-equal with The Lockdown Hauntings. It feels a routinely conceived Police Procedural, combined with an Imprisonment Thriller. None of the plotting, nor Ford’s direction, does much to hold your attention. The one aspect that does is the nasty ending, although even that has been substantially borrowed from Se7en (1995).
Trailer here