Making its international premiere at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival is Petri Kotwica’s Finnish noir thriller, Rat King.
Juri (Max Ovaska) is an eighteen year old student whose life revolves around video games, so much so that it’ he has begun to alienate his mother and girlfriend. After his online gaming buddies disappear, he tries to get back into reality until one night his internet friend “Modred,” aka Niki (Julius Lavonen), contacts him for help. Niki is stuck playing a game that has real life and deadly consequences and, despite the warnings, Juri joins in on the “fun” and he is dubbed “Rat King” in the game. With the help of Niki, Juri begins to complete the meaningless tasks until he reaches level four. In order to focus on the game and since they look alike, Juri gets his hair cut and sends Niki to school so that he doesn’t flunk out. The tension begins to rise as Juri realizes this game is not a joke and that his life is at stake if he decides to quit the game before he finishes the final level.
While there are issues with the movie, the first half hour is actually really cool and succeeds in creating a somber atmosphere that shows just how obsessed Juri really is. If you remember the movie Doom, the one thing it did to make it feel like a game was shooting an action sequence like a first person shooter which, while cool, didn’t help make it a better film. In Rat King, Juri incorporates video games into his reality rather than letting reality stay warped in video games. For example, there is a scene where Yuri is playing goalie and as he zones out he lifts his hand like he’s holding a mouse, then you see the players on the field with red and blue circles around the base of their feet like in a game of FIFA. There are other scenes similar to this, including a first person shooter one, but the point is to show you how the gaming obsessed begin to lose control over their own reality.
There are a handful of issues with this film that unfortunately make it lose all of its credibility. When Niki and Juri begin to switch places everything goes well because Niki keeps his head down and mostly stays away from people who 
know Juri. But when he starts interacting with people that’s when the red flag should go up. You’d think that when Niki interacts with Juri’s mother (Outi Mäenpää) that she would suspect something was up, but that’s not the case. She must be the world’s worst mother if she can’t even recognize that her son is an imposter, hell they both have different marks on their face that you can easily notice. Whatever happened to a mother’s intuition, or do Finnish mothers just not have that? I could say the same thing for his girlfriend Mia (Niina Koponen), wouldn’t she know when he kisses her using her woman’s intuition?
Additionally, there were parts that were in the film that made no sense. Why was the gym teacher infatuated with helping Yuri and how did he get his cell phone number? Not only is that really creepy but Juri keeps trying to avoid him so you think he’d get the gist, he’s a gamer not an athlete, I don’t care if he spiked the volleyball once in gym class. *SPOILER* Also, at the end when Niki tells the graduation audience that there is a massive bomb under the stage that will detonate in two minutes, the people run outside about 50 feet from the school. Now I’m no bomb expert, but I’m pretty sure the rule of smoking 25 feet from a building doesn’t get doubled when applied to massive IEDs (improvised explosive devices), you have to run at least 75 feet away.
At the moment, Rat King is my least favorite film in the Cinemania section of the festival. It has a lot of really cool elements to it, like the fusion of reality and the virtual reality of video games, but other than that the movie moves too slow, becomes somewhat predictable and everything that happens is either too convenient or unbelievable.
Rating: A nice try and one I rooted for but in the end a flawed effort (4.5/10)
You can catch Rat King at the festival on:
Thursday April 19th at 6:30 pm at the Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 6
Friday April 20th at 11:30 pm at the AMC Loews Village 7 – 3
Friday April 27th at 3:00 pm at the AMC Loews Village 7 – 1
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