Eephus (2024)

Perhaps a new definitive USAmerican existential horror film. Nothing matters, no heroes outlast the tedium, the stupid pointless game won't let you leave the field until it's sated with tears of boredom and beers of sorrow. Through the ritual a quiet madness takes control, a hope that playing on will stop the night from falling on what friendships they have with one another. A single solitary fan becomes kingmaker. A community alive with flaws is bulldozed for the sake of institutional infrastructure. People who could never be someone slip away into the woods, the darkness, go back to being just people. Two hundred years hence, water-war salvage pickers will comb the ruins of the school, sieze upon a jacket, a bat, a beer can, a dozen lost baseballs—they'll say “men, real men, used to meet each other in battle here, in glorious combat”, and they'll be wrong. Very, very wrong. Eephus is a zero-sum game where everyone loses.