A game that traps you in one pair of eyes goes to a film that must pick one

Sony Pictures has acquired the feature-film rights to Mouthwashing, the first-person horror game about a wrecked space freighter, with Karyn Kusama attached to direct, according to two entertainment trade reports published on October 29. ^[1][2]

The story of the film is under wraps. There is no release date, no cast and no word on how the adaptation will treat the thing that made the game what it is. ^[2]

What is known

Mouthwashing was made by the Sweden-based studio Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex. It reached Steam on September 26, 2024. ^[3] The studio describes it as a first-person horror game that follows the dying crew of a shipwrecked space freighter. ^[4]

The ship is the Tulpar. After a crash, supplies run down and the crew comes under pressure. ^[1][3]

The Hollywood Reporter says the game scored 88 on Metacritic, won Best Narrative and Players' Choice at the Horror Game Awards and Best Hidden Gem at the New York Game Awards, and has sold nearly one million units on PC. ^[1] That is a long way from a blockbuster franchise, and closer to the kind of cult property that studios now buy early and cheaply.

On the film side, Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay are attached to write. Kusama's credits include The Invitation, Destroyer and Jennifer's Body, and Manfredi and Hay have worked with her before. ^[1][2] Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill and Vince Cheng are producing through Crooked Highway, which has a deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment to make feature films for its Screen Gems label. ^[1][2]

Both trades report the rights and the attachments. ^[1][2] Neither reports anything about the plot or the format, and no further statement from Sony has been reported. ^[2]

The problem a camera creates

The game, as The Hollywood Reporter describes it, runs on a nonlinear narrative and surreal imagery, and it is about responsibility, denial and what unchecked power does to the people under it. ^[1] Those are themes a film can carry. Cinema has always been good at denial.

The harder part is the method. In a first-person game the story arrives through one pair of eyes, in an order the designers choose. The player is not told what to feel about the crew, but is placed where the feeling has to happen.

The first-person view and the broken timeline are part of how the game hands out information, and they are not just a way of looking at the setting.

A film has no hands on the controls. It can only watch, and it must decide whose eyes to watch through. That choice is the adaptation.

Keep the first-person camera and you risk a gimmick that wears thin in 20 minutes. Step back to a conventional ensemble and you have a space-crew thriller, of which there are many.

This is my reading and not a reported detail of the project. But it is the reason the announcement matters beyond one deal.

Studios have long bought games for their audiences and then discarded the thing that earned those audiences. A game earns dread by implicating you, and a film has to earn it another way.

Why Kusama is an interesting choice

The trades do not say why she was picked, and I will not pretend they do. But her credits point to a director who works with unease and with people under strain. The Invitation, Destroyer and Jennifer's Body are very different films, but none of them depends on spectacle. A story about a small crew coming apart in a ship that cannot go anywhere needs a director who can hold a room.

The writers are a known pairing with her, which suggests a team that already has a shorthand. That is a practical advantage on a project with an unusual source.

What to watch

The first real answers will be the ones Sony has not given. Does the film follow the game's events, or take another route through the same ship? Is the broken timeline kept? Who is cast, and when does shooting start?

None of this is in the trade reports. ^[2]

Mouthwashing is also a small test of whether the games industry can sell something other than its biggest names to film. Its stories are made of choices about where the player stands. If a good film comes of it, it will be because someone found a new answer to that question, and not because the plot was copied across.