Director – Patrick Lussier, Screenplay – Simon Boyes & Adam Mason, Producers – Bradley Pilz, Lucas Jarach, Adam Mason & Johannes Roberts, Photography – Mac Fisken, Music – Steve Moore, Visual Effects Supervisor – Adam Lima, Special Effects – Anthony Delzio, John Eggett & Shaun O’Neal, Makeup Effects Design – Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Production Design – Caitlin Laingen. Production Company – Voltage Pictures/Green Light Pictures/Bradley Pilz Productions/Divide-Conquer.
Cast
Bailee Madison (Chloe Albright), Jerry O’Connell (The Coroner), Anthony Turpel (T.J. Albright), Chris Lee (Ross), Chris Butler (Sheriff Duggan), Jorge-Luis Pallo (Mannix)
Plot
Med student Chloe Albright receives a letter informing her that the life insurance pay-out she was awaiting has been denied because her father’s death was ruled a suicide. Without this, their house is being repossessed. At the same time, Chloe’s younger brother T.J. is persuaded by her ex-boyfriend Ross to act as a getaway driver in a bank robbery. However, things to go wrong and Ross is shot by a security guard. T.J. flees the scenes and takes refuge with Chloe – only to then realise that details of his involvement will be on Ross’s phone. Chloe comes up with a plan to take a drug that will put her into a death-like state so that she can be taken to the morgue where she can then awake, sneak into the evidence room and retrieve the phone from Ross’s body. This works – only for Chloe to discover that the coroner is running an illegal organ harvesting scheme.
Play Dead comes with a script from British director Adam Mason and his regular co-writer Simon Boyes. Since the early 2000s, Mason has proven an independent name in horror directing films such as Dust (2000), The 13th Sign (2000), Broken (2006), The Devil’s Chair (2006), Blood River (2009), Luster (2010), Pig (2010), Hangman (2015), I’m Just F*cking With You (2019), Songbird (2020) and Baby Blue (2022), as well as the scripts for Not Safe for Work (2014) and The Visitor (2022).
Play Dead is lumbered with a major credulity-straining premise. Bailee Madison’s brother T.J. (Anthony Turpel) gets in trouble when he agrees to act as getaway driver for Bailee’s ex Ross (Chris Lee) in a bank robbery. This proceeds to go wrong and Ross is shot only for evidence of T.J.’s involvement to be left on Ross’s phone. Bailee’s response is to take a drug that fakes death-like symptoms and be taken to the morgue so that she can wake up and then sneak in to the evidence room and retrieve the phone from Lee’s body. (Somewhere in all of this, her scheme is dependent on police not searching Ross’s body before it is taken away and placing the phone into evidence).
Bailee Madison is menaced by The Coroner (Jerry O’Connell)
Upon waking up, Bailee discovers that she is in the midst of an Organ Harvesting scheme run by Jerry O’Connell in a rare villainous performance. Lots of running around the morgue ensues. This gets drawn out with assorted complications, although the feeling is that we are dealing with a script that might have worked for a half-hour anthology tv series episode that has been dragged out to a 106 minute runtime. Some of the set-ups, like where Bailee Madison sneaks in to gets the keys while Jerry O’Connell has his back turned as he is occupied with an autopsy, get dragged out way longer than their natural length.
It is also a script that seems stretched beyond plausibility. Chris Lee is taken to the morgue after being shot – you know, the place where corpses are meant to go when they are pronounced to be dead – and then for no apparent reason miraculously comes around on the morgue table. The end is also dependent on the beleaguered brother and sister being helped out by possibly the most benevolent organ harvester in the history of criminality. Everything is played safely and neatly wrapped up without Patrick Lussier generating any real tension or ever leaving you feeling that Bailee Madison was in danger. There is at least one cool effect where we see Jerry O’Connell’s face being frozen with CO2 and then shattered as he falls.
