User reviews

I gave it 3 because the cinematography is really rather good, and Naima Wifstrand, a stalwart of Swedish cinema for decades, is in the cast. Otherwise it's trash, and would have been included in Pauline Kael's wonderful essay The Come-Dressed-As -The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties if it had been made a few years earlier. This is the kind of movie that is made to shock the bourgeoisie, and I am not the least surprised that Shirley Temple was horrified by it. It fails however on the most fundamental level--that of revealing something important about the hero's psyche. Instead we are given party scenes that go on forever, with grotesque characters you'd never meet outside of a mental hospital.

Criterion channel brought back three of Mai Zetterling's films from the 60's, and on the evidence of Night Games they shouldn't have bothered.

Night Games is 2h02 long. Please don't waste these precious hours of your life on this movie!

The black and white photography and the framing and editing of the film are impressive. Thereafter, it's all downhill, I regret.

A deranged mother alternately pushing her son away and keeping him close ( a bit too close for audience comfort). OK, they mess you up your mum (and dad) ...., but this takes far too long to make the point.

One found it difficult to care about the damaged goods of a son, and what were all these orgy-grotesque Fellini film types doing padding the running type out? A film, additionally, about western decadence probably? But, Oh, dear!

I admired Mai Zetterling as an actress in the 50s and 60s, and, more generally, in her wish to transcend stereotyped views of beautiful Swedish (and other national) actresses - from behind the camera.

Night Games is, however, a pretentious failure.