House of Games

David Mamet's first work as a director, about confidence tricksters. Margaret is a successful psychiatrist. She has written a book and has a name. When one of her patients says he is being threatened over a gambling debt, she goes to the back room of a bar to settle it. There she meets Mike. He makes her an offer: he will forget the debt if she watches his work up close. What follows is a story of curiosity. Margaret wants to learn how the con works, and the more she learns the further in she goes. What the film really describes is technique: how trust is built, where attention is drawn, and how a person is deceived through what they want to believe. Mamet studied the subject for years, and most of the routines in the film are real methods. The dialogue is again in his known rhythm: short, flat and deliberately artificial. Lindsay Crouse plays Margaret and Joe Mantegna plays Mike. One of the founding examples of its genre for anyone who likes con films and narratives constructed like puzzles. For a viewer expecting naturalistic acting, the lines are deliberately unnatural and that can jar in the early scenes.