13 Tzameti

The climax of Michael Cimino’s famous (and utterly knuckle-biting) Vietnam saga The Deer Hunter features a maddened Robert De Niro and an incoherent Christopher Walken taking turns brandishing a pistol against their temples as a party of twisted, grinning soldiers gambles over their lives in a mind-numbing game of Russian roulette. Stretch this nerve-wrenching scene into 90 minutes of concentrated anxiety and you end up with the film 13 Tzameti. In Georgian director Géla Babluani’s ?rst feature ?lm, a young roof worker naively enters a clandestine game where obscenely wealthy men bet on a circle of human targets who each ?re a near-empty gun into the head of the profusely sweating person in front of them, the last surviving member earning both his life and millions of dollars. With its austere aesthetic, and pacing that’ll induce teeth-grinding, 13 Tzameti ?res on every last one of its loaded cylinders.