The game of life

Movies talk to each other. What did the films of 2025 have to say? This is a look at how three movies from the past year tackle similar subjects in different ways. Be warned, SPOILERS for Eephus and Cloud follow.

We play games to rehearse for life. We come up with obstacles and set rules and bend our minds and bodies to the task of transcending them, a bowdlerized version of how we must face the tribulations and orders and unexpected turns of the world outside the boundaries of sport. Because the most sprawling and confusing game still contains more order than real life, and a game is still play. Something frivolous that pulls you away from harsh reality — in theory, at least.

The real world quickly intrudes on the baseball game that constitutes nearly all of Carson Lund’s Eephus, which concerns the final showdown of the season between two amateur teams in a small Massachusetts town. But this October classic will also be the final game at the field, which will be ploughed under to build a new elementary school — a decision made in part on the recommendation of Riverdogs captain Graham (played by Stephen Radochia; nearly the entire cast is local New Englanders and no one here is a star or even a name, these are true Guys) as part of his day job as an engineer. Because all the guys on the Riverdogs and apparent longtime rivals Adler’s Paint have day jobs or classes or families, real-world things that the game lets them put on the back burner for a while. Ages range from 50s to 20s and a few young players could still possibly have a shot at future glory, but many of these men will not step on a ballfield again, even though another diamond exists a few towns over. It smells bad, the guys say, and it’s too far. 

The teams can barely even make it to this field — in the first of several rule-bends, the Riverdogs bat first with only eight men, hoping to keep the hits coming long enough to give their catcher time to arrive (which he does with wonderful Masshole goofball energy, unaware that he’s late and rushing into the batter’s box in order to smack a hit and immediately fall flat because he didn’t stretch first). The game can continue, the rather uptight umpire rules, and what follows is the purest baseball ever captured in a narrative film because narrative largely goes out the window. Eephus is set at some point in the 1990s, when cell phones were a luxury and landlines were the only access point to the internet, while a radio can be heard it’s clearly background to what’s on the field. But there are still plenty of distractions, as there should be. There is a difference between being distracted to something, like a second screen or a portal to another place — that is multi-tasking, a division of the self. But to be distracted from something is different, it is a way to wander and return. And distraction is as much a part of baseball as the game itself.

So guys talk shit with each other and at the asshole stoners chilling in left field, they drink beers in the dugout, they swing and miss and get pissed, they occasionally jack a homer beyond the fence into the woods. The camera often leaves the field entirely to check out the few people watching from the bleachers, including a surprisingly and hilariously despondent hot dog salesman and an old guy named Franny (played by Cliff Blake) who is keeping a scorecard and has clearly done so at every game these teams have played. Even back on the field the action can fall away, as an Adler’s Paint pitcher hanging out in the dugout describes the titular pitch, a high slow toss that seems to hang in the air before dropping into the strike zone, baffling hitters used to a different rhythm. But he’s still got an eye on the field and jumps up for a teammate’s hit: “Double if he can leg this out.” The game is on.

***

If Ryosuke Yoshii is playing a game, he does not appear to be having any fun. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud opens with Yoshii ruthlessly buying out a bankrupt inventor’s inventory of sleep assistance machines, buying them for far below market value and pointing out the inventor would just have to pay someone to take them away regardless. But then Yoshii (who is played with weaselly gormless pathos by Masaki Suda) goes home to his high-end camera setup, takes a few photos of the devices and puts the lot on an online auction site, listing each machine at twenty times the price he paid. And then he waits. Yoshii gets a bottled water (he never seems to drink anything else) and sits in a chair maybe a dozen feet from the monitor flashing his wares, staring intently into the vast wasteland of the internet with a deadpan expression that can’t quite conceal the anxiety in his eyes during this limbo.

Yoshii is a reseller, of anything he can buy low and sell high. This could be medical equipment, it could be limited edition dolls of a pop idol, it could be designer handbags that are almost certainly fake. Yoshii tells someone he can’t tell if that last item is fraudulent or not and this seems true, but the deeper truth is that Yoshii does not care one way or another. As a reseller he creates a liminal, parasitic space that insulates him from others — all of his transactions take place under the name “Ratel,” which is another name for the honey badger and an extremely funny handle for the scrawny and oft-torpid Yoshii . The handbag only exists as an item he can intercept and profit from on its way to a buyer he will never meet. Or so he thinks.

Reselling is Yoshii’s side hustle but it’s far more profitable than his work folding shirts at a clothing factory. So he spurns his obsequious boss’ offer of a promotion and quits that job, and also demurs from throwing in with an old school pal (and fellow reseller) who wants to start his own business. The only person Yoshii cares about is his girlfriend Akiko {Kotone Furukawa, exquisitely self-absorbed), and as strange things start to happen — an animal carcass left by his door, a trip wire stretched across the path where he rides his moped — he decides to take his money and girl out of Tokyo to a new house in the boonies, where he can buy and sell just fine in a large house that’s just as sterile and lifeless as his apartment and where he can afford an assistant in Sano, played by Daiken Okudaira as a cheerful young man from town who is devoted to serving his boss. And Sano is the first to poke around online and find out that internet comments and forum threads and even a website are full of people who are furious at “Ratel,” and who want to find out who he really is so they can take their revenge.

Malaise and disassociation leading to violence is right up Kurosawa’s alley, but what is surprising is how funny a lot of this is and how well that contributes to the uneasy atmosphere. Before Yoshii leaves town his boss comes by the apartment for a visit; Yoshii’s panicky attempts to pretend he is not home are straight out of sitcom 101 but Kurosawa’s shots of the boss — silently staring from the street, facing the door, never with his face fully visible — create a real menace. Vandals angry at city interlopers break the window of Yoshii’s new home; Sano finds one and forces him to apologize to Yoshii and the poor teen’s absolute pants-shitting fear is amusing and unsettling in equal measure. This youth is not the only person to get his ass kicked, the loser who bought those handbags and tried to run his own scam is pummeled by a would-be mark and decides to turn his impotent frustration outward against Yoshii. He meets up IRL with other people from those message boards to plan their deadly vengeance and it is laughable how dorky these dudes are. But what is not as funny is how one guy is here on what he says is his second such mission, and that he not only does not know Yoshii but has never interacted with “Ratel.” He’s just here for the violence, he tells the wary handbag victim, and encourages him to lighten up. “Just think of it like a game.”

***

Most professional games come with a clock, but not baseball (well, at least until recently). Three strikes and you’re out, three outs and your half of the inning is over, nine innings and that’s the ballgame, but the space between these numbers is elastic. It could be infinite. But it is not. While there are no watches or digital scoreboards to tell the time in Eephus, a church bell can be heard throughout the game, tolling ever-increasing hours. And the sun itself is going down on this field with no lights. Throughout the game Lund drops interjections of Frederick Wiseman reading famous quotes about the game, including one from Yogi Berra: “It gets late early out there.” Baseball’s structure may be timeless (fuck the pitch clock) but time itself waits for no man. And the umpire has to be home for dinner, so after the seventh inning (the game has been official since the fifth) he announces he’s leaving. You can’t have a game without someone calling balls and strikes.

The back half of Eephus is a remarkably poignant balancing act, as the players find ways to keep the game alive, to maintain the timeless flow even as the innings march on and the sun sets over Central Massachusetts. What no one will state outright is that this is the last time that the vast majority of these guys will see each other, let alone play a sport that they have clearly loved for decades. The teams confer and nominate Franny to serve as umpire and Franny, clearly pleased and honored by his elevated position, climbs to the field’s old broadcasting booth in order to get a better view of home plate. The game goes on. Riverdogs pitcher Troy (David Pridemore), who has been constantly knocking back beers while throwing a hell of a game, finally has to pass the ball on. Starting pitcher Troy is done. But, Graham persuades, can Reliever Troy come back for a few innings? “I can’t go on, I must go on,” the aging pitcher of The Baseball Project’s “Past Time” sings, Beckett (Sam, not Josh) on the mound trying to find his stuff. 

But before Reliever Troy has to return to the field he is spelled by a strange man who seems to walk out of the woods, a guy who talks a good game and promises to get three outs in this one. Pulling a player out of the stands (he certainly wasn’t on the lineup card) is unorthodox to say the least, but this rando is played by 70s Red Sox hurler “Spaceman” Bill Lee, a legendary weirdo who has never even been on nodding terms with the orthodox. Lee, of course, is a master of the eephus, and he uses it to strike out the side, just like he promised. Then he walks back into the dusk like a foulmouthed revenant too prickly to play a full game on a field of dreams but happy enough to grab a half inning here. And the guys on the field, bemused as they are by the pitch and the man throwing it, are fine letting him grab it. This is not to say there are no arguments, and the fiercest come from Graham’s own teammates as he makes increasingly conservative decisions, maintaining a tie instead of going for the win. Is this out of guilt? Is he trying to extend the game at the expense of playing it wholeheartedly? Harsh words are exchanged but they are between men who are fighting over the right way to play the game, even as the game’s time is running out.

***

Yoshii has no idea what the hell is going on when men break down his door. This is because that handbag sucker is wearing a sack mask out of The Strangers, which is first frightening but quickly hilarious as he can’t get it to stay on his head properly. But then Yoshii sees that guy who was selling medical devices, and his former boss, and his ex-compatriot in reselling (along with that weirdo along for the ride and another person who turns out to have the largest grievance of them all), and it becomes clearer what is happening here. But it is still inexplicable in a larger sense — Yoshii has offended and ripped off and fucked with the lives of these men, but he has done so from behind a computer screen or his own blank disregard for them, not through any physical attack. That is not part of his game, yet a physical attack is what he faces, chased through his house and the bleak wintry countryside before finally being caught and hauled to an abandoned factory, where his tormentors plan to set him on fire. This will be livestreamed, of course.

In more overtly horrific movies like Cure and Pulse and Creepy, Kurosawa creates a miasma of discomfort that concentrates and curdles into dread and fear, the sense that something is wrong beyond fixing. This tone hums under the first half of Cloud despite the flashes of humor and it is even more comically counterpointed in the second half — the problem is very clear, it is these fucking dudes. Their incompetence and squabbling is darkly funny, it is also in no way a hindrance to their ability to harm. Yoshii’s former boss shoots and kills a hunter who stumbles across the kidnapping and while — what else — scrolling through his phone, the handbag guy sees a news report that the former boss has murdered his own family before joining up with the vigilante crew. This boomerangs back on that unsettling scene from earlier where Yoshii hides from his boss’ sudden appearance outside his home — perhaps he was right to do so. Maybe Yoshii’s  estrangement from humanity is a survival technique when humanity is ready to hunt you down for sport.

On the other hand, that estrangement means no one is left to help you out. Certainly not Akiko, who seems quite ready to let Yoshii die as long as she can get his money. But Sano, despite being angrily dismissed by Yoshii for touching his computer earlier, remains loyal to his boss. Sano meets up with a stern but oddly deferential man who passes over a gun and ammunition and oblique approval from some larger organization, and heads off to the factory on a rescue mission. If Yoshii’s face is blankness that masks insecurity and learns terror, Sano’s guileless face conceals nothing and expresses capability in all situations, including strolling into a building full of violent men and immediately executing them. This sets off Cloud’s lengthy last act, in which Sano rescues Yoshii and the pair shoot their way out of this endless empty wasteland that used to be a building full of people working, making stuff instead of selling it. Kurosawa stages this with spatial clarity in individual encounters while leaving the larger layout unclear, people in different rooms have no idea where the others are and the number of industrial garages and catwalks and loading zones seems to increase with every minute. A few years ago Chad Stahleski’s John Wick Chapter 4 choreographed a much-lauded gunfight based on the aesthetics of a videogame, I thought that scene sucked and but loved how Kurosawa here films his violence with the nervous energy and extremely varying levels of competence of a paintball match, people unaccustomed to the art of war — or maybe very accustomed to playing first-person shooters — stalking each other in uncertain spaces. But these guns are real, the game is for keeps, and time is up for Yoshii’s haters.

***

Throughout Eephus we see every bit of the field, but the area beyond is less tangible. A player chasing down a foul ball — only so many balls to go around and they need this one to keep the game going — wanders into the woods and enters a twilight eerieness cut off from not just the game but the larger world these men ostensibly came from and will at some point return to (although he also sees a kid he earlier told to buy him some smokes furtively lighting up). This isolation makes the game feel more precious, that when it ends everything else will end too. The darkness comes on strong, too dark to see the ball, and the game is still tied heading into the late innings. The field’s lights have been turned off for the season but the players on both teams pull their cars around to the outskirts of the infield and put on their high beams. Enough light to see, to keep the game alive.

But it’s been dying all along. Ed, the Adler’s Paint starting pitcher, gets yanked not because of arm troubles but because he’s missing his nephew’s baptism and his brother (Ed is played by Keith William Richards and his brother by Wayne Diamond, making for an amusing Uncut Gems reunion of sorts) drives up to yell at him and be yelled at in turn before the two of them peel off to catch the ceremony. He never returns. Dilberto, another Paint player who is portrayed by David Torres Jr  with a grim narrow face and Cobb-esque intensity, walks away from the game rather than keep playing in the dark, although his frustrations at the plate probably play a role as well. Bill, a Riverdog with a dad bod and a sharp, subtle wit, tells his wife and kids to stick around in the evening chill for one more at-bat and grounds out to first. It’s the last time his kids will ever see their old man play ball, he notes on the bench, and Russell J. Gannon quietly conveys the heart-deep bitterness in this whimper of an ending. But endings come no matter what, and there is no guarantee they come when you want or with the honor you hope for.

Reliever Troy is done and a Riverdog outfielder comes in to pitch (the now-Outfielder Troy collapses on the grass, on the field but out of the game), he’s one of the few players who is young enough and skilled enough to maybe keep playing somewhere. But he quickly finds himself in a jam, the bases loaded. Franny is trying his best but his calls are becoming increasingly erratic, and why not — this ump may not be blind but like everyone else in the night, he can barely see. It comes down to one pitch, on a full count with two outs and the bases loaded. A walkout ends the game and a strikeout keeps it going. The ball comes in and the batter doesn’t swing, so it’s all on Franny. And he makes the call: Ball four. Take your base. At least Mighty Casey went down swinging, walking in the winning run is the saddest, most pathetic way to end a ballgame. 

Lund is very careful here, filming that final pitch in low light and somewhat ambiguous, but it sure looks like a ball to me. Which makes Franny’s call is right and sad and an echo of an earlier moment, when Graham tries to make it to third on a single and gets thrown out. This extends the tie, but Graham’s overreach was an attempt to win, to play the game and not prolong it. Franny chooses reality over romance, the truth of the game over its ideal. The game means everything to him, but he steps up to end it. At the start of the movie Franny ironically intones Lou Gehrig’s famous words from his retirement ceremony, complete with muttered reverb: “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He repeats the lines when the game is over and this time the irony is gentler but the loss keener. 

***

The Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint players don’t have much to say as they pack up their gear. A few gather at the pitcher’s mound to shoot off fireworks but Lund does not turn his camera to the sky. Instead it catches the people on the ground, illuminated in flashes of light, their faces tired and staring into what they’ve tried to avoid for as long as possible. To be bereaved is to deprived, of something that cannot be restored. “But it’s already past him, or it waits until he’s done swinging,” a player described the titular pitch earlier. That’s how the eephus works, and even knowing it is coming you will still be too late, on the wrong side of time passing you by.  “The Eephus makes him lose track of time. It’s pretty mean that way.” 

The gunfight in Cloud seems to go on forever, but it does end with Yoshii and Sano victorious. And that’s when the film gets mean. Akiko returns, clearly upset to find Yoshii still alive, and it is hilarious how she’s barely even trying to conceal the gun behind her back and how Yoshii is blind to it anyway. So Sano makes one final killshot to help out his boss and this absolutely devastates Yoshii. He has moved from disaffection to wariness to frustration to fear over the course of the movie, each shift bringing out slightly more feeling, but this is the first time he has expressed any emotion over someone else. Yoshii sobs and sobs over the body of a woman who hated him — the gun she would have killed him with lying on the ground beside her — and this blows past dark comedy into an inversion of meaningful connection that is much more disconcerting than simple apathy. 

But it’s the last thing tying Yoshii to his old life, and a new one awaits. Sano drives him away from the slaughter with queasy green rear projection visible out the windows, where they are going is obviously unreal and just as obviously bad. But it is a place where Yoshii can keep reselling, Sano eagerly tells him. He is good at this, the best person Sano has ever seen. “Please keep focusing only on making money, I’ll handle the rest,” Sano enthuses. “Everything will be obtainable. Whatever you want. Even things that can end the world.” “So this is how you get to hell,” Yoshii responds as the film ends.

***

In an odd way, Cloud echoes The Serpent’s Path, which Kurosawa directed (off a script by Hiroshi Takahashi) in 1998 and then remade in France two years ago — both involve a protagonist of extremely dubious character assisted in their mission by a suspiciously competent adjutant who is more than he appears and both climax with endless shootouts in ominous, empty industrial spaces. And both end with the revelation that the protagonist has entered another plane of existence: Hell. But especially in Cloud, Kurosawa seems to be drawing from Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1960 horror classic Jigoku, which also involves a fairly passive guy who gets caught up in an immoral act (this time directly because of a demonic buddy with bad intentions) and flees to the countryside with his girl. And like Cloud, Jigoku pulls back to show that nearly everyone in the movie is not just venal but evil, engaging in their worst instincts for meaningless gain, and then kills them all off. Jigoku’s infamous last act is an extended tour of Buddhist Hell, where everyone involved is hideously tortured with extremely gory effects. Kurosawa forgoes this but in Okudaira’s glee at Suda’s work, he suggests the other aspect of Jigoku’s Hell, literalized by a giant clock with hands never turning — that it is an endless minute, a time that is seen to exist and yet not pass. It echoes Yoshii, staring at his screens, waiting for a sale. It also echoes the long slow innings of a baseball game.

Writing about Cloud, Dan Schindel describes how Kurosawa is the master of evoking a certain tone: “the background radiation of unease, the ineffable off-ness of a world divested of third spaces, of ever-increasing isolation.” Eephus is about the loss of one of those third spaces and the unease and isolation the men who use it feel at its passing, and the undertone of Lund’s film is that these spaces and this game, despite their promises, will always end. That loss is baked into baseball, the eephus always comes down, and that this will never not hurt. The ballplayers of Eephus drive away from their last game without friendly words or promises to meet again, there will be no “six months later” tag here. Lund does not deny the sadness here, but he also does not deny the way these men interact with each other through this game, from pissy rivalry to guarded respect to jovial bullshit. The movie is a monument to these moments and their impermanence, and it can only exist because the game has ended, its time circumscribed. 

In some ways Franny shares a sensibility with Yoshii — they both attach themselves to a process that does not need them, and they seem to have very little else in their lives. But Franny is ultimately able to walk away, even if it leaves him with nothing. Yoshii cannot exist with nothing (or maybe, more grimly, can’t not exist if he decides to have nothing), does not know how to exist without a product to intercept and watch as it leaves his possession. He has to keep selling in a third space that is not just the the internet but the internet of sales, of abstracted connection. It exists as long as someone has something someone else wants, which will be forever. Cloud says Hell is eternal, Eephus says heaven is ephemeral, both say their games have real stakes. Yoshii wins the game and loses his soul; while one team in Eephus wins the game both teams wind up losing everything. Life can be pretty mean that way. But a good game is still time well spent, given meaning by the knowledge of an end that doesn’t have to come just yet. As a wise man once said, it ain’t over till it’s over.