A teacher’s head bursts, and red marbles spill across the classroom floor. That is how Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will begins, and it never pauses to explain itself. Shun Takahata is a high school student so bored with school and everyday life that he prays for something, anything, to happen. Within minutes he and his classmates are playing children’s games with their lives as the stake. The 2014 film adapts the first arc of the manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura. It is billed as thriller, horror and comedy all at once, and it rarely stays in any one of them for long.

The first game is Daruma-san ga koronda, the Japanese cousin of Red Light, Green Light. Anyone caught moving dies. Their heads burst into those small red marbles. Nothing about this is subtle, and it works anyway, because the rules come straight from a playground and the film trades on that familiarity to build dread. A talking Daruma doll presides over the game. Later a lucky cat with sharp claws turns a charm for good fortune into an executioner. The idea is simple, and Miike commits to it without hesitation. A toy that kills is funny for about a second, then frightening, and the film keeps swinging between those two reactions, sometimes within a single scene.

Sota Fukushi plays Shun, and the part asks him to be something of a blank at first. That is harder than it looks. He is believable as a boy who wished for excitement and is now finding out what the wish costs. The role gives him little to do except react, yet he reacts well, and his bewilderment keeps the early games grounded. Ryunosuke Kamiki, as Takeru Amaya, has the showier part. Amaya is a disturbed young man who takes real pleasure in the slaughter, and Kamiki plays him with a relish that makes the other students look even more frightened. The two are opposites, and the film’s warmest, oddest moments come from watching them forced into a partnership. A boy who dreads the games and a boy who loves them make an unlikely team. They are also the only pairing the film bothers to develop.

The rest of the cast has far less room. Hirona Yamazaki plays Ichika Akimoto, Mio Yuki is Shouko Takase, Jingi Irie is Eiji Oku and Shota Sometani is Satake, and each registers as a type before the next game claims someone. Nao Omori as Takumi, Nijiro Murakami as Haruhiko Kikkawa and Lily Franky as the Homeless Man pass through briefly. I wanted to know more about almost all of them. When a classmate dies seconds after we learn their name, the moment lands as a special effect rather than a loss, and that is a problem in a story built around a room full of people being thinned out one game at a time.

That is the film’s main weakness. The games arrive one after another, each with a new monster and a new rule, and the structure begins to feel like a string of set pieces on a thin line. The source material runs to five volumes, and squeezing its first arc into a single feature leaves the film hurrying. Some games have room to breathe and build real suspense. Others read as an excuse for the next gag or the next burst of red. The shifts between horror and comedy are uneven too. A scene can win a laugh from sheer absurdity and then ask us to take a death seriously a moment later, and the film does not always manage the turn.

Still, the premise carries real force. Shun’s opening wish is the film’s sharpest idea: he asked for change and received a nightmare. The film never lectures about this, which is to its credit, but the thought hangs over every game. Being bored is hardly a crime, and the price he pays is absurdly out of proportion. It is a dark joke at the expense of anyone who has stared out of a classroom window wishing for a different life. I wish Miike had pushed it further, because the film seems to know it has something there and then keeps moving.

Miike is at his best when he lets the absurdity run. The sharp-clawed lucky cat is ridiculous and menacing in equal measure, and the scene does not apologise for being either. When the film trusts its own strangeness, it is hard to look away. When it reaches for emotional weight, particularly around the bond between Shun and Amaya, it feels less sure of itself, as if it had borrowed the feeling from another kind of movie.

So this is a mixed bag, but an entertaining one. It is loud, gory and often funny, and the two leads supply enough chemistry to hold together a story that lurches from game to game. Don’t expect tidy rules or supporting characters you will remember. Expect a Daruma doll that talks, a head that bursts into marbles, and a handful of images strange enough to forgive a good deal.