Panic Fest 2025 Coverage
Play Dead review
Play Dead walks the opposite path from In a Violent Nature…but finds a similar conclusion.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Play Dead
Directed by Carlos Goitia
Written by Gonzalo Mellid and Camilo Zaffora
Starring Paula Brasca
Play Dead Review
Last year’s In a Violent Nature was received as something of a revelation. While it was a fun watch…it was really more of an experiment. Could you flip a slasher movie around and make it work from the POV of a silent killer? Does the story need to contain a final girl arc and scenes spent building up soon to be disposed of characters? In a Violent Nature cheats a little in that the regular slasher story, from the POV of its survivor and friends, plays out in the background. It cheats a lot when it comes to the final scenes of the movie which inexplicably switch over to the perspective of the final girl that we’ve spent little time with throughout the story. The answer to the experiment was mostly…kind of.
Play Dead isn’t all that like In a Violent Nature on the surface. It is decidedly from the perspective of its final girl like character. Most horror movies are. What it does differently is drop us in the middle of her survival story. No set-up. No backstory. We don’t know who this person is at all. We have no connection to her…how she got here…or what she has waiting for her if she makes it through the movie. Play Dead sticks us so close to its protagonist that its masked killer, stalking around the background from time to time, becomes like the non-killer characters in the background of In a Violent Nature. They’re important for the story to progress…but the story isn’t about them. Until it is.
If we consider Play Dead a similar experiment…can a horror movie work if you strip away staples like character traits, dialog and legends about the killer…it finds an equally emphatic “kind of” for an answer before reinstating many of the things that it purposely jettisoned to begin with. Both cases seem to have discovered that one doesn’t work without the other. Which is probably why slasher movies have been about both the final girl and the killer for as long as there have been slasher movies.
Alison (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a pile of dead bodies. She’s in someone’s basement. We don’t know how or why. A large, masked killer occasionally comes down to take one of the bodies upstairs with him. Alison pretends to be dead while the man is around…searching for a way out while he is away. Her opportunity comes when the man picks her body to be the next one taken upstairs.
I honestly don’t remember if Alison’s name is even given during Play Dead. It’s possible that she mentioned it to another girl who is (briefly) alive during her time in the basement. It could have been stated by whoever she calls while her phone briefly works before the killer stomps on it. She might even say it once she’s upstairs and the direction of the movie changes into something different. What I can tell you is that her name doesn’t matter. In fact, as seems largely the point of Play Dead’s experiment…her entire identity doesn’t matter. It drops us into her struggle for survival without that information.
Play Dead clocks in at a brisk 72 minutes long. We spend a good deal of that time in the basement with Alison and a pile of bodies. She’s forced to remain silent while the killer moves around…leading to some effective horror scenes. When the killer is away…she works on stitching up her injury and searching for a way out. This section is the movie’s experiment. Knowledge is limited to unavailable…like we woke up with amnesia right next to Alison. It works…though the pressing question remains…where can we go with this?
The answer to that is…upstairs. Once Alison is taken upstairs Play Dead isn’t running the same experiment anymore. Instead, it has opened itself up to some explanations about the killer we’ve watched Alison avoid all movie. There are no long exposition scenes to fill in these gaps (though there is, finally, a character for Alison to interact with again). Simply a flickering slide show and some things to infer along the way.
Play Dead is an intriguing idea that seems to figure out it can only be taken so far. Instead of a hyper focus on an unknown protagonist…it opens itself up to details about the rarely seen antagonist. In a Violent Nature ended up making the same flip in the opposite direction. Play Dead, it must be said, pulls it off more elegantly. The ending of In a Violent Nature feels more like a cheat because the gimmick was so clearly adhered to beforehand. Play Dead doesn’t make a big deal out of what it’s choosing to omit from the story. When we are given any clues…even though they’re about characters we haven’t followed…it feels more natural.
There are some fun moments in Play Dead. It makes the most out of its setting switch from basement to dining room. Things are brighter, no less creepy, and equally dangerous for Alison. Paula Brasca is excellent in a role that asks her to carry every scene…often silently. The ending may leave people feeling a bit cold, however. It too ends up quite like In a Violent Nature’s problem sticking the landing. As if neither movie fully understood whose story it was the whole time.
Scare Value
Experimenting with the slasher formula has, thus far, led to two opposite approaches yielding two similar results. Entertaining movies that present a familiar story in a new way…and inevitably need to turn back towards the pieces that the story sells itself on excluding. Play Dead picks up in the middle of the story to deliver an intriguing and worthwhile watch. But you know it’s going to double back at some point.
