‘Mouthwashing’ Movie Is Happening: Karyn Kusama Directs Sony’s Adaptation of the Viral Horror Game, and Everything We Know
The most talked-about indie horror game of the last two years is going to the movies, and Sony did not hand it to a gun-for-hire. Karyn Kusama , the director of The Invitation and Jennifer's Body and the filmmaker who set the tone for Yellowjackets , is attached to direct a feature adaptation of Mouthwashing , the low-poly space-freighter nightmare from Swedish studio Wrong Organ. The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline both reported the deal on Thursday, Oct. 29, and the developer confirmed it the same day on X with a blunt "The rumors are true."
It is a stacked team. Kusama's longtime writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are on script, and the producers are Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the duo behind Sinister and The Black Phone , through their Crooked Highway banner alongside Vince Cheng. Below: the details, the people, the game's unlikely rise, the numbers that made Hollywood pay attention, and why this is the most interesting video game horror adaptation on the board right now.
Watch: Mouthwashing's Console Announcement
No footage exists for the film yet, so here is the official console announcement video from publisher Critical Reflex. It is a good, quick look at the game's grimy, crushed-PS1 aesthetic and the claustrophobic world Kusama now has to translate to the big screen.
The Details: What's Confirmed
- Studio: Sony Pictures acquired the film rights from developer Wrong Organ and publisher Critical Reflex. Several outlets, including World of Reel and Cosmic Book News, place the project at Sony's genre label Screen Gems, where Crooked Highway has its deal.
- Director: Karyn Kusama.
- Writers: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.
- Producers: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill and Vince Cheng for Crooked Highway.
- Cast, release date, production start: none announced. Story specifics are being kept under wraps.
The timing is not an accident. The film news landed the same day Mouthwashing finally reached consoles. According to iHorror and Engadget, the game launched Oct. 29 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch, with Xbox Game Pass availability from day one (iHorror also lists PS4 and Xbox One). Those ports were first announced back in February 2025 for "sometime in 2025," so console players waited a long time, and they got a movie announcement as a launch-day bonus.
Worth noting for the scoop-trackers: Cosmic Book News says it first reported a Screen Gems Mouthwashing project on Oct. 16, citing scooper Daniel Richtman. That was a rumor until this week. Now it is a deal with names attached.
Wait, What Is Mouthwashing?
If you missed it, here is the spoiler-free pitch. Mouthwashing is a short, first-person narrative horror game set aboard the Tulpar, a cargo freighter owned by a delivery company called Pony Express. After a crash leaves the ship stranded in deep space, its five crew members are trapped together as supplies run down: the captain, Curly, who can no longer speak or move; co-pilot Jimmy; medic Anya; mechanic Swansea; and the intern, Daisuke. There is barely any combat and almost no survival mechanics. The horror comes from the people, from what they did, what they are hiding, and what they become when there is no rescue coming. The game jumps around in time, and the less you know going in, the harder it hits.
It also deals with very heavy subject matter, which is part of why it became such a phenomenon and part of why adapting it is a real challenge. More on that below.
The game was made by a small Swedish team (Wrong Organ previously made the short How Fish Is Made ), written by Johanna Kasurinen, who also served as art lead, with music by Martin Halldin. GamesRadar reported it was built in about 15 months. It ran in Steam Next Fest as a demo in February 2024 and launched on PC via Steam on Sept. 26, 2024.
Who's Behind the Movie
Karyn Kusama, Director
Kusama is one of the most respected genre directors working, and one of the most under-used. She broke out with Girlfight in 2000, which shared Sundance's Grand Jury Prize and won its Directing Award. Then came the studio sci-fi detour Æon Flux (2005), a $62 million Paramount film that grossed about $52 million worldwide and was recut over her head. In 2009 she made Jennifer's Body from Diablo Cody's script. It was sold as a sexy teen thriller to the wrong audience, grossed roughly $31.6 million on a $16 million budget, scored a C- CinemaScore, and has since been reclaimed as a feminist cult classic. If you were a horror fan in 2009 who defended it, you were right early.
Her real calling card, and the reason this match makes so much sense, is The Invitation. The 2015 dinner-party thriller premiered at SXSW on March 13, 2015, was made for about $1 million, won Best Film at Sitges, and holds a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a slow squeeze of dread among people who share a terrible history, in a single location, where the audience senses something is deeply wrong long before anyone says it. Swap the Hollywood Hills house for a dying spaceship and you are halfway to Mouthwashing already.
After that came her segment "Her Only Living Son" in the 2017 anthology XX and the Nicole Kidman crime drama Destroyer (2018), which grossed just over $5 million on a budget north of $10 million. On TV she directed and executive produced the Yellowjackets pilot and earned Emmy recognition for it. As World of Reel points out, she has not directed a feature since Destroyer. She came close with a modern-day Dracula at Blumhouse, also written by Hay and Manfredi, which was canceled in April 2022, just weeks before filming. World of Reel also notes there is no word yet on whether Mouthwashing will be her next film.
Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, Writers
Hay (who is married to Kusama) and Manfredi met in an improv group at Brown and have written together for over two decades. Their credits swing wildly, from Crazy/Beautiful and Æon Flux to the 2010 Clash of the Titans , R.I.P.D. and both Ride Along movies. But their best work by far has come with Kusama: The Invitation and Destroyer , both of which are about characters crushed by the past and lying to everyone around them, including themselves. That is the exact emotional engine of this game.
Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, Producers
Photo: C. Robert Cargill via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
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Crooked Highway has quietly become one of the most reliable names in commercial horror. Derrickson and Cargill co-wrote Sinister (2012), which turned a $3 million budget into $87.7 million worldwide. The Black Phone (2022) made $161.4 million on a $16-18 million budget with an 81% Rotten Tomatoes score, and Black Phone 2 (2025) added about $132 million on $30 million. These are producers who know how to make a disturbing, character-driven horror movie that also sells tickets. That is exactly the balancing act Mouthwashing needs.
By the Numbers: Why Hollywood Came Calling
- Sales: Over 500,000 copies on Steam by February 2025, per Game Developer. Dark Horizons and Cosmic Book News (citing Deadline) now put it at close to 1 million units.
- Reviews: 88 on Metacritic, 92% "recommend" on OpenCritic, a 9/10 from IGN and an "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam rating within two weeks of launch.
- Long tail: GameDiscoverCo's Simon Carless told GamesRadar it had sold at least 10 to 15 times its first-week numbers, calling that "incredibly rare compared to most games." Concurrent players grew nearly 260% in its second month.
- Awards: Best Narrative and Players' Choice at the 2024 Horror Game Awards, Best Hidden Gem at the 2025 New York Game Awards, plus nominations at DICE, the GDC Awards and the Indie Game Awards, and an honorable mention for the IGF's Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
- Social: Cosmic Book News reports Mouthwashing content has racked up nearly 1 billion TikTok views, and GamesRadar noted the soundtrack hit 1 million Spotify streams within a couple of months.
That last pair of numbers matters most. This game did not get big through a marketing budget. It got big through word of mouth, streamers, theory videos and fan art. That is the same pipeline that turned Five Nights at Freddy's into a movie franchise.
Analysis: Sony Is Betting on a Director, Not Just an IP
Video game horror adaptations have a messy record, and the comparisons here are useful. Blumhouse's Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) is the ceiling: made for $20 million, it opened to $80 million while streaming on Peacock the same day and finished at $297.2 million worldwide, despite a 33% Rotten Tomatoes score. The fanbase showed up no matter what. Sony's own Until Dawn (2025), made through Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions, is the cautionary tale: $54 million worldwide on a $15 million budget, a C+ CinemaScore, and a story that drifted far from the game. It was profitable, but nobody is calling it a franchise-starter. And Sony's Resident Evil run, which Engadget suggests the studio would love to repeat, proved game horror can carry a decade of sequels if the brand is strong enough.
Mouthwashing is a different animal from all three. FNAF had a decade of lore and a mascot-friendly PG-13 hook. Until Dawn and Resident Evil are built on set pieces and monsters. Mouthwashing has five people, one ship and a moral rot at the center of it. There is no monster to put on a poster. The scares are guilt, denial and the slow realization of what happened before the game began. That is why hiring Kusama is the smartest move here. A studio chasing a quick cash-in would have hired a commercial director and leaned on jump scares. Sony hired the person who made The Invitation , a movie that runs almost entirely on the audience reading a room.
It is also a statement about scale. The Invitation playbook is cheap: one location, small cast, maximum tension. A Mouthwashing movie could be made for a fraction of a tentpole budget, and with Crooked Highway's history of turning small horror budgets into nine-figure grosses, the math looks good even if it does not hit FNAF numbers.
The real risk is tone. The game handles grim material through implication, abstraction and its deliberately ugly low-poly look, which puts a strange distance between you and the worst of it. Live action removes that buffer. Lean too hard and it becomes punishing; soften it and the fans who made this game a hit will notice immediately. The other risk is the structure. So much of the game's power comes from its time jumps and the player slowly piecing together the truth, and that is hard to replicate when the audience is not holding the controller. Kusama and her writers have handled unreliable perspective and dreadful reveals before. This will be their biggest test of it.
What We Still Don't Know
- Who is cast as Jimmy, Curly, Anya, Swansea and Daisuke. Fan casting has already started, and it will get loud.
- Whether the film stays faithful to the game's plot or invents a new story set in the same world, the route Until Dawn took.
- How involved Wrong Organ will be. Their public reaction suggests they are thrilled, but no creative role has been announced.
- Whether this is Kusama's next feature, and when cameras roll. No production date has been set.
- Rating. An R seems essential, but nothing is confirmed.
Bottom Line
This is the rare game adaptation announcement that inspires more excitement than dread. A cult hit built on guilt and silence is going to a director who specializes in exactly that, with writers who share her wavelength and producers who know how to sell quiet horror to a wide audience. The hard part is still ahead, but the people in charge are the right ones.
Your turn: can Mouthwashing work in live action, or is that low-poly look doing too much of the heavy lifting? And who's your Jimmy?
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Header photo: Karyn Kusama at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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