Critics reviews

The titular truth game has words instead of bullets, just a bit of cruel divertissement to liven up an awkward party... Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Exterminating Angel, or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by way of Marienbad.

Icy in its satire, this is a cruelly manipulative and boldly unrealistic dissection of bourgeois foibles... Unfortunately, [Fassbinder's] cynical detachment leaves us appalled but unmoved.

As far as chamber-drama goes, R.W. Fassbinder's CHINESE ROULETTE proves to be kammerspiel in high fashion... This being a Fassbinder film, the primary concern is a thirst for power, this time sought by the couple's young daughter. As she enacts her game of "truth-telling" with the guests gathered at the mansion, the game being played is one of the very fruits of cinema: truths being told through fictitious exaggerations, without the actual truth being revealed.

Chinese Roulette is quite different from his earlier bourgeois satires. The script is boldly non-naturalistic... and the style, all double reflections and shifting points of view, suspends the cast like flies in an amber of deceptions, neuroses and panics. The humour fits the cruelty as a boot fits a groin.

Chinese Roulette is a spiky glass ornament of a film... It’s hard to think of another film this side of Mommie Dearest where the maternal bond has been so irretrievably poisoned. Fassbinder’s surfaces are like fashion shoots, but the more you admire the make-up, the more you notice what it’s desperately trying to hide: the scars of lifelong emotional combat.

One of writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s more obscure works, Chinese Roulette—because words, not bullets, do most of the damage here—is also one of his towering achievements: a rigorous illumination of deception as a survival tactic, and a vicious indictment of victimhood, martyrdom, and the games people will play in order to destroy one other.

The camera seems much more interested in exploring the glass and chrome furnishings than in examining the characters, and by the time the film is finished, so is the audience—the untrammeled alienation effects alienate you right out of the theater.

[Chinese Roulette] is a mysterious comedy of such deliberate elegance that it constitutes a kind of introduction to the later, so‐called Sirkian (after Douglas Sirk) period of this extraordinary young German director... Though the mood is cool and distant, the film is hypnotic. One can't break away from it.