Play Dead (2025) Review

In an era with bloated run times and needlessly slow-burning screenplays testing your patience to it’s very limits Play Dead is a welcome departure. Clocking in at a brisk seventy-two minutes (which is shorter than a vast majority of the episodes in the final series of Stranger Things) there is little fat to trim off this feature.

The film opens when the main protagonist Alison (played by Paula Brasca) regains consciousness in a drab and dreary basement with seemingly no explanation as to how she arrived there, surrounded by several deceased women. The fact that so little back story is given here is interesting, as it immediately sets the audience’s collective brain into defence mode, eager to discover just circumstance has befallen these women, and what they have been dragged into with little, to no backstory ever being given for many of them.

As the main antagonist is introduced, we see an almost shameless nod to Leatherface from the often imitated, never duplicated Texas Chainsaw Massacre film from 1974. The towering, masked figure (played by Damian Castillo) is seen trudging down the stairs to the basement, effortlessly picking up the deceased women and carrying them upstairs, shutting the door behind him and leaving Allison who he presumes to be dead to her own devices as she attempts to find some way out of the basement.

The positives for this film would have to be the care and attention that director Carlos Goitia has taken in creating a sense of claustrophobia, from the drab colours and lighting used in the main location of the basement, to the lack of musical accompaniment the limited dialogue included throughout the film. It is also worth mentioning that Paula Brasca says more with her eyes than most actors in the horror genre can say in an entire script and that her acting in general largely carries the film. There is no escaping that the premise of the film is an original spin on the tried and true formula of the ‘Survival Horror’ sub-genre, and the fact that the tension is seeped in through the entire duration (until the twist is revealed, but we won’t be discussing that here) and the fact that so much dread is achieved with so little outside influence from other characters and different locations etc is remarkable.

The faults in this film however, come in the form of a disappointing pay off. The twist in the film is original, well thought out and could have been great. Yet the way that it is delivered felt as though time was running out on production and the short lead time of the film ultimately does it harm as the resolution is found in an almost insultingly easy way. Meaning that all the tension and anxiety that has been building for much of the movie is completely undone in the space of a few short minutes at the end and you can’t help but feel a little cheated.

Play Dead is a good film, that should have been great.

Movie Rating:

Play Dead trailer