Series 7

A television contest: six people chosen at random are given guns, and the last one alive wins. Dawn is the previous season's champion and eight months pregnant. This season is played in her home town, and one of her opponents is the man she loved when she was young. Daniel Minahan writes and directs. Brooke Smith plays Dawn. The film is built not as a story but as a broadcast. The cutting, the sound, the voiceover, the previews and the promos into commercial breaks imitate the entire language of an actual contest show. You are not positioned as watching a film but as watching a marathon rerun of the programme. It came out in 2001, when reality television was only just spreading in America. What seemed like an exaggeration then was reproduced in various forms afterwards, both by television itself and by work like The Hunger Games. Minahan went on to work mainly in television and became a director on major series, which is the film's own irony: he joined the medium he satirised. Who it is for: viewers interested in black satire, mock documentary form and media criticism. Who it is not for: none of the characters is genuinely developed. That is deliberate, but anyone looking for an emotional grip will find none.