Review: Play Dead

Cinema & Digital: Play Dead (2022)

Chloe (Bailee Madison) fakes her own death to get inside a morgue and recover evidence that would incriminate her brother T.J. (Anthony Turpel) after a crime he has recently committed. Unfortunately for her the coroner (Jerry O’Connell) at the near abandoned morgue is a sick and twisted individual who is in cahoots with the local law enforcement and is harvesting body parts from people whom he keeps alive until he has had his use of them.

Chloe’s attempt at recovering the evidence doesn’t go as well as she planned, leaving her in a life and death game of cat and mouse inside the morgue.

Play Dead makes good use of its limited budget and locations through lighting and sound to create an ominous atmosphere, while director Patrick Lussier is no stranger to creating scares and tension, all accompanied by his regular special make-up effects guy Gary J. Tunnicliffe (make sure to listen to my 2 shows with Gary).

Madison and Turpel play their roles well, despite the characters being nothing more different than what I’ve already seen many times before in movies like this, but I did enjoy O’Connell playing his character more deadpan and intimidating, rather than as an over the top loud psychopath which so easily could have been the way to do it.

With Gary J. Tunnicliffe doing the special make-up effects a high quality is assured. I just wish that more of his work was featured.

Play Dead does nothing to make it stand out from other genre movies of its ilk, but the 106 minute running time went by rather quickly and I was definitely invested in how everything played out, despite their being no real big surprises along the way.