A Mouthwashing movie only works if it refuses to comfort us

Can you adapt a game whose whole point is that you can't look away, into a medium where you can always look away? That is the question hanging over the news that Sony wants a Mouthwashing movie.

What Sony actually bought

As The Hollywood Reporter reports, Sony Pictures has acquired the feature film rights to the game from developer Wrong Organ and publisher Critical Reflex. Deadline also reports the deal. Scott Derrickson produces with C. Robert Cargill and Vince Cheng under Crooked Highway, Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay are writing, and Karyn Kusama is attached to direct. The trio of Kusama, Manfredi and Hay previously made The Invitation and Destroyer together.

The premise, per the same report: five crew members stranded on the freighter Tulpar after it crash lands on an asteroid, with dwindling supplies, isolation and paranoia exposing the fractures between them. The game launched on PC in 2024, scored 88 on Metacritic, and has sold nearly one million units on PC. The studio says related content has drawn nearly one billion views on TikTok. In our view, Sony is buying a cultural footprint, not just a story.

The danger is the Resident Evil playbook

The Hollywood Reporter frames the deal as Sony moving on to another game after successfully relaunching Resident Evil. We read that as Sony hoping for another hit, and that worries us. Resident Evil is a franchise that works as a crowd-pleasing machine. Mouthwashing, by THR's own description, is about responsibility, denial and the consequences of unchecked power. That's not a monster-of-the-week premise, and treating it as one would be the easiest way to wreck it.

The temptation is obvious: make the asteroid survival tale into a tense, jump-scare-friendly thriller with a clean villain and a satisfying twist. We think that would be a betrayal. The game's horror comes from dread and moral discomfort, not from things leaping out of vents. If the film hands the audience an external threat to blame, it lets everyone off the hook, including the characters.

Guilt was the interface

Here is the hard part, and we'd say the film's real test. A game makes you complicit by putting you inside a perspective. It is first-person, and the nonlinear structure makes you assemble the horror piece by piece. A film can't hand over a controller. It can only imitate that complicity through craft: point of view, withheld information, structure that makes the audience sit in discomfort rather than escape it.

That's why the creative team gives us some cautious hope. Kusama and her writers have made psychological thrillers together, and to us that is the right toolbox. Derrickson's horror pedigree helps, too, though we'd urge him to resist the commercial instincts that come with a studio horror brand. These are our impressions of their track records, not a prediction of the result. Nothing in the announcement says anything about tone, rating or release date, so for now all of this is hope.

What we'd tell Sony

Don't sand it down. A mid-budget, nasty, uncompromising film that divides audiences would, in our opinion, honor a game that is about discomfort rather than reassurance. A polished, reassuring version might make money, but it would prove the skeptics right about adaptations that keep the title and lose the point.

Our verdict: the rights deal is good news only if Sony treats cruelty as the product, not a risk to be managed. If the movie lets us leave the theater comfortable, it will have missed the whole thing. Players who loved the game should watch with high hopes and a low tolerance for softening.