All Fun and Games is the kind of movie that takes place in Salem, Massachusetts and still somehow manages to be the least interesting cursed object in the room. You’re telling me there’s witch history, creepy folklore, and centuries of paranoia to draw from, and the best we got was: “kids find evil knife, demon invents Saw Jr. with recess rules”?
It’s like someone heard the phrase “childhood games, but deadly” and greenlit the logline before asking trivial follow-up questions like, “Do we have characters?” or “Will any of this be scary?”
Spoiler: not really.
Cursed Knife, Cursed Script
The setup is as simple as it is lazy: a group of teens in Salem stumble upon a cursed knife that unleashes a demon. This demon, clearly a bored theater kid trapped in hell, decides to torment them by forcing them to play lethal versions of childhood games. Tag, hide-and-seek, all that good nostalgic stuff—now with extra dismemberment.
On paper, this is a fun idea. In practice, the movie treats it like the writers wrote “DEMON GAMES” on a whiteboard and then went on break for three weeks.
The rules of the curse are vague enough to be confusing, but not in a mysterious, intriguing way—more in a “we’ll just change this if we need to stretch the runtime” way. Sometimes the demon feels bound by the rules. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the knife matters. Sometimes the demon just does what it wants. The only consistent rule is that no one explains anything in a satisfying way.
The result isn’t ominous, it’s just messy.
The Fletchers: A Family in Peril, Emotionally Unavailable
We’ve got the Fletcher family at the center of this chaos:
-
Marcus (Asa Butterfield) – the moody older brother with a permanent “I’m too old for this and somehow also for this script” expression.
-
Billie (Natalia Dyer) – the sister, doing her best to act through what is essentially Final Girl Mad Libs.
-
Jonah (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) – the kid brother, prime demon possession bait.
-
Sophie (Laurel Marsden) – another sibling, whose main job is to exist and be endangered.
-
Kathy (Annabeth Gish) – the mom, doing her best in the proud horror tradition of “parent whose main role is to be concerned and conveniently absent when the plot needs it.”
The cast is actually solid. Butterfield and Dyer in particular have proven they can do nuance, emotion, and weirdness in other projects. Here they’re stuck playing characters whose depth is “is related to the plot.” You can almost see them trying to squeeze personality into scenes that have all the emotional texture of a photocopied script page.
There are hints of family drama and sibling tension that could’ve made this interesting: resentment, guilt, responsibility. Instead of exploring any of that, the movie speeds past it like, “We’d love to unpack that, but we’ve got a demon who really wants to reinvent Red Light, Green Light.”
Demon Says “Tag, You’re Dead”
The demon itself, tied to the knife and to some tragic Daniel Good backstory, is weirdly flavorless for a supernatural entity obsessed with games. You’d expect something playful, sadistic, maybe even charismatic. Instead we get a generically creepy presence that occasionally possesses people and mostly relies on the soundtrack yelling “BE SCARED NOW” whenever it does anything.
The “deadly games” concept also never fully embraces its own potential. Imagine a movie that fully leaned into each game, building rules, tension, and unique scares around them. Instead, many sequences feel like a normal chase or kill scene with a vague “we’re calling this hide-and-seek, I guess” label slapped on.
It doesn’t help that the demon’s end goal is never particularly compelling beyond “cause pain because cursed knife.” There’s no philosophical edge, no twisted moral logic, not even a delightfully petty demon vendetta. It’s just generic evil and a lot of off-brand lore.
Salem, But Make It Irrelevant
Setting the story in Salem should add weight. You’ve got deep witchcraft history, generational trauma, all that delicious paranoia baked into the town’s name. Instead, Salem here might as well be “Random Small Horror Town, USA” with better branding.
There’s no sense of the town as a character, no real engagement with its legacy. It’s just a spooky label slapped on top of a fairly standard “this could be anywhere” horror layout. If you’re going to name-drop Salem, at least give us something more than “generic woods” and “vaguely old buildings.”
It’s like staging Macbeth and then never mentioning Scotland.
A PG-13 Soul in R-Rated Clothing
All Fun and Games wants to seem edgy, but it rarely commits. The kills are quick, the gore is restrained, and the camera cuts away often enough that it feels like it’s protecting both the audience and the rating. That’s fine if you’re going for psychological dread or slow-burn horror.
This movie is not.
It wants to be a gnarly little ride, the kind of film that makes you side-eye that old schoolyard chant. But because it holds back, it ends up in an uncanny valley where it’s too brutal to be fun and too timid to be truly disturbing. You end up not clutching your pearls or your popcorn—just your phone.
Scares often rely on jump-cutting and loud noise rather than tension or atmosphere. You can practically count down the beats: quiet, quiet, sudden sound + face. It’s less horror than Pavlov.
Wasted Potential: Party Games from Hell
There are flashes—brief ones—where you can see the better movie hiding underneath. A game setup that actually plays with childhood nostalgia. A moment between siblings that hints at something deeper. A kill that almost reaches gleeful inventiveness.
But those moments never connect into something cohesive. The rules of the games are underdeveloped. The demon’s personality is a blank. The characters are reactively tossed between set pieces instead of actively making meaningful choices.
It’s especially frustrating because the concept is so inherently ripe. We’ve seen “games but deadly” done brilliantly elsewhere: moral games, escape room structures, ritual games with folklore logic. Here, the film never figures out whether it wants to be mean-spirited fun, mythic horror, or YA trauma with blood.
So it just kind of… is. It exists. Like the horror equivalent of “we played a party game once and it was fine.”
Everyone Deserved Better (Especially the Viewers)
Asa Butterfield spends much of the film looking haunted, but not always in the way the movie intends. He’s got expressive eyes, but even they can’t sell every line of clunky exposition. Natalia Dyer does what she can with Billie, but you can sense the ceiling the script has placed above her. The younger actors, particularly Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, are game (pun unfortunately intended), but again, there’s only so much you can do when character arcs are mostly “be normal” → “be terrified” → “maybe die.”
You get the sense this could’ve worked as a tight, bloody 90-minute festival flick with sharper writing and clearer rules. Instead, it feels like a first draft that never quite got upgraded from “idea we pitched in a meeting once.”
Final Score: All Setup, No Payoff
All Fun and Games is one of those horror films that will probably haunt you—not with images or scares, but with the nagging thought, “How did you mess up a premise this easy?”
It’s not unwatchable. It’s not offensively bad. It’s just aggressively mediocre, and in horror, that’s almost worse than being a complete disaster. A total train wreck can be fun. This is more like waiting for a train that keeps promising to arrive, then watching a scooter roll past and call itself public transportation.
If you’re an Asa Butterfield or Natalia Dyer completionist, or if you absolutely must see every “cursed game” horror flick ever made, you might get some mild enjoyment out of this. For everyone else, the real game here is seeing how long you can stay invested before your brain quietly decides to tap out and daydream about better movies.
In the end, All Fun and Games proves its own thesis accidentally: there are no winners here. Only survivors. And most of them are in the audience.
