The Queen’s Gambit made chess cool. This series turns it into a psychological thriller

Rematch ★★★½

Watching a game of chess can be a thrilling experience – even for a novice with only a basic grasp of the game. Like Test cricket, classical chess is slow, contemplative, epic, thrilling and crushing. It’s the ultimate slow-burn; the decisive moments that alter the course of an hours-long match can happen at any given moment. There’s nowhere to hide when a player makes a fatal blunder or executes a winning move that their opponent didn’t see coming.

Orion Lee (left) as PC and Christian Cooke as Garry Kasparov in Rematch.

Despite its rich history and customs, chess doesn’t loom large in film and TV. In 2020, The Queen’s Gambit came out of nowhere, a super-charged, fictionalised story of a young prodigy with a troubled childhood, an addiction and a killer wardrobe who turns the stuffy world of competitive chess upside down.

It went on to become a critical and audience hit and was rightly applauded for its depictions of damaged personalities and insights to the dangers of obsession and competition.

There’s Searching For Bobby Fischer (1993) and Bobby Fischer Against The World (2011), which deal with one of chess’ most famous – if divisive – players, but there’s not a lot more out there.

The six-part drama Rematch gets a bet each way. It is based on the true story of Garry Kasparov, the Russian-Armenian who held the title of World Champion for an astonishing 15 years from 1985 to 2000.

Molly Harris and Sarah Bolger in Rematch.

In the late 1990s, he agreed to play a series of matches against IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue. The games took place in Philadelphia and New York, and were broadcast all over the world. Key chapters of Kasparov’s life also play out in flashbacks and digressions, some more convincingly than others.

Billed as a psychological thriller – though the results of the original match and subsequent rematch are well known – Rematch is a hero as underdog story.

Kasparov may not qualify as a conventional underdog, but Rematch frames his decision to play Deep Blue as a pivotal and defining battle, not just because of his undefeated record and pride but as a harbinger of the looming computer age. “How do you make a computer blink?” was the catchy slogan IBM used to promote the event.

Loading

In one corner, the shy, socially awkward champ (played by English actor Christian Cooke), his doting mother Klara (Trine Dyrholm, The Legacy) and manager Roger Laver (Aidan Quinn).

In the other, the programmer whose life’s work was spent developing Deep Blue, an ambitious executive (played by The Tudors’ Sarah Bolger) who saw the stunt as a ladder-climbing opportunity and the ruthless boss of the tanking IBM.

A key theme of Rematch is whether the machine – a hulking metal frame whose inner red glow is reminiscent of the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey – can surpass Kasparov’s intellectual, humanistic and instinctive strategies. It’s a question that hovers over Rematch and much contemporary discussion about AI.

Rematch doesn’t provide a conclusive answer. Rather, it presents the matches as a noble experiment on the part of Kasparov and the programmers, which was ultimately sacrificed to corporate interests. It’s worth noting that no chess player today can beat the engine, whose computing power can predict and evaluate moves way beyond what the human brain is capable of.

Despite the occasional lapse into biopic cliche, Rematch mostly gets it right. It was directed and co-written by Canadian Yan England and won the International Competition grand prize at the 2024 Series Mania festival.

Rematch is now streaming on 10 Play.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Most Viewed in Culture

Loading