Portraying a true crime on screen is always a dangerous game: either you build an unsustainable-and perhaps insensitive-mystery, or you opt for a cold, factual retelling that too often feels predictable. A Widow's Game doesn't hide its cards: from the very first move, we know who died (the husband), who survived (the widow), and who most likely wielded the knife. The mystery, therefore, isn't the point. Instead, the film is a sequence of well-worn moves, leaving the viewer to decide whether they want to watch the pieces fall or simply confirm that, yes, everything collapsed exactly as expected.
And collapse it did. The protagonist, Maje-practically a black widow lifted from a rushed femme fatale handbook-parades through the story with subtle ambition and calculated hunger, manipulating men like someone changing outfits. The script occasionally seems interested in exploring her erotic, lethal edge, but it quickly retreats to the safety of factual reconstruction: she cheated, she seduced, she planned, she used. There's no room for deep psychological complexity here, just the linear trajectory of a woman who turned desire and survival into a sharpened weapon. Was there a lack of venom? Perhaps. A lack of the hesitation that humanizes-or corrupts-such characters? Undoubtedly.
The film's structure relies on that classic device of starting with the investigation-led by Eva, a detective as tough as she is sharp-only to shuffle between past and present, back and forth, adding no real layers, just reiterating what we already suspect. The narrative is preoccupied with dissecting who was manipulated, who hid what, who stumbled first. Salva, the manipulated man, is one of those who falls headfirst into the widow's web, convinced he can pull a few strings himself. In the end, of course, he's tangled, suffocated, and-ironically-still believing he can outmaneuver the woman who played him.
This double game-he thinks he's manipulating, but she's always two steps ahead-might be the film's only truly compelling dynamic. Not because it's novel, but because of the morbid pleasure in watching the ruin of a man deluded enough to think he could master someone who plays by her own rules. It's in this clash of wills, this push-and-pull of power, that the film briefly comes alive. And yet, when the house of cards finally collapses, the script seems more interested in documenting the fall than in hinting at its cracks. There's no perverse thrill, no mounting suspense-just the inevitable crash, filmed competently but without fire.
In the end, A Widow's Game is more report than reinvention, more chronicle than tragedy. It's efficient, even good-but it lacks the kind of risk that Maje herself embodies and that the film, ironically, refuses to take. What lingers is this feeling: the game was played, the house fell, the pieces scattered-but for the audience, the match ended long before checkmate.
