The Coldest Game

Released 18th September 2019, The Coldest Game portrays a fictional grandmaster chess tournament which took place parallel to the Cuban missile crisis. Despite there being no tournament in real life, the film takes several occurrences from the crisis and uses them to enhance the themes of loyalty, responsibility, trust and strategy. There some broadened themes which branch off of the aforementioned, however, these are the most prevalent throughout. You sometimes wish that chess is better applied to the narrative, given the events of the film, however it can be accepted as the game is displayed as being a proxy event for the espionage occurring.

Bill Pullman gives an astounding performance as the dishevelled Joshua Mansky as he insinuates his overbearing intelligence and the effect it has on his cognitive ability. Through this, you get a sometimes unexplored aspect into alcoholism and how, on rare occasions, it isn’t detrimental to individual people. James Bloor is also rather good with his performance of Agent White; he really sells the humanity that many Cold War agents would have had and how it affects their mental state. Everyone else is very archetypical of a Cold War narrative i.e., Aleksey Serebryakov is the hard-faced Russian General, Corey Johnson is the hard-headed American operative and Lotte Verbeek is the female-aide to Mansky.

In grounding the film parallel to the Cuban missile crisis, each ‘day’ in the film uses TV clips from the corresponding day of the crisis; a choice which makes the narrative so much more engaging and cohesive. The soundtrack is unfortunately unmemorable, that and it also utilises modern music at a pint where, not only does it make sense to contrast the time period, but it acts as a detriment to what should be a moment of emotion thus hindering its impact. In short, The Coldest Game is a film with vast ideas to convey, and subsequent subversions, which are bogged down by a lack of consistent flair.