Filmmaker John Appel’s father was a gambler who tempted chance at nearly every opportunity. Early in the film, Appels recalls his father taking the family for a vacation by pitching a tent in the middle of a stranger’s garden, a location the rest of the family discovered only the next morning. Using his father’s story as a springboard, Appels embarks on a larger meditation on the psychosis behind perpetual betting and swindling. To that end, we meet three characters: a bookie at the horse racetrack, who at 62 remains unmarried but with piles of photos of ex-girlfriends who could not endure his ways; an incarcerated swindler, who even behind bars cannot resist the compulsion to cheat; and a casino gambler, called back time and time again to the poker table, betting sums of money he doesn’t have. The romance with risk, the thrill of getting caught, the pain of loss, the desperate attempts to conceal—throughout all these stories runs the thread of an irresistible, seductive, dangerous urge.  ST