Playwright David Mamet's brilliant debut as a film director, House of Games is a psychological thriller in which a young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game by one of her patients, who entraps her--with her own subconscious connivance--in a series of criminal escapades. It is a breathless roller-coaster ride of a movie that keeps springing one bizarre surprise after another, sustaining suspense with dazzling audacity. The unsuspecting audience is lured into a psychological and moral thicket of troubling implications, which bear the unmistakable imprint of Mamet's intensely personal vision.
