Psychiatrist Margaret, author of a best-selling book, is distressed when her patient, Billy, shows a gun during a session and threatens to kill himself because he owes 25,000$ to a con man, Mike. In order to help him, Margaret goes to a shaddy bar and confronts Mike herself, asking if he can forgive the debt. Mike tells her Billy only owes 800$, and that he will forgive the debt is she watches if a man will play with his ring during a poker game, a signal that he is bluffing. When Mike loses the poker game anyway, Margaret decides to write a check for 6,000$ to save him, but realizes it was all a con game, a confidence trick, and that the man works for Mike. Excited by this world, Margaret follows Mike on another con game, but when it goes wrong, an undercover cop is shot and a briefcase with 80,000$ goes missing, she agrees to pay 80,000$ for Mike because he claims the mafia might kill him. Later, when she sees the dead cop is alive and was just an actor, Margaret realizes it was all a trick, so she shoots Mike in a warehouse. Since there were no traces left, Margaret returns back to her normal life.
Movies about con men often have very fascinating explanations or reveals of methods as to how victims are lured into their confidence trick, whether it is movies like "Pickpocket" and "Sweet Bunch" which show secret thefts and petty crimes, or movies like "Matchstick Men", which go a level further, presenting a direct hypnosis of a victim who is persuaded through various contextes to voluntarily give his or her fortune to the con man. Excellent "House of Games" belongs in the latter category, and is an astounding character study of a psychiatrist Margaret who realizes she herself has no clue about her own psychology, which is much more easily understood by con man Mike (excellent Joe Mantegna), who sees a rich, bored woman eager for some excitment and need to prove herself she can help others—that he uses that completely against her in a giant confidence trick.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, "House of Games" is a clever storyline that slowly goes under your skin: you watch only 15 minutes of it, and you have to see it to the end, because you want to know how it will end. The opening act is indeed incredible: since her patient threatens to kill himself because he owes a lot of money to Mike, psychiatrist Margaret decides to help him in an unorthodox, direct way—by going to the shady bar and talking to Mike directly (!), asking him to cancel the debt to her patient. From there on, the story plays out like the episode 4 of season 1 of "Rick and Morty" where Rick was constantly fooled into thinking he is in a real world, only to realize it was all just a simulated reality, but that goes even a level further, since even the next reality is also a simulated reality, and the next one. A similar plot point is made when Margaret herself cannot know when the end is of the confidence trick of Mike's scam, since there is another level to it, and another, all until the twist ending. Screenwriter and director David Mamet has some sense for snappy writing (such as when Mike says: "I'm from the United States of kiss-my-ass!"), but he is also able to connect all these plot points into a harmonious whole, in a movie that feels complete and with a clear point as to what it wants to say. The only flaw is Lindsay Crouse's robotic acting—sure, her character is too snobbish to understand as to what it is to be human, but she should have showed at least some raw emotion in the finale.
Grade:+++
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