A Canadian documentary maker with diabetes dramatises his existential health fears as playful, witty, occasionally disturbing body-horror interludes in Play Dead! Mostly shot in director Matthew Lancit’s modest family apartment in Paris, with his wife and daughters as supporting cast, this off-kilter blend of intimate home movie and low-budget special effects thriller plays like a freewheeling montage of observational vignettes, light on structure or factual context. All the same, it is consistently engaging and droll, with some genuinely macabre moments and resourceful use of lo-fi prosthetic effects. Following its world premiere this week in DOK Leipzig film festival’s more arty Camera Lucida section, Lancit’s quirky DIY meditation on sickness and mortality has sufficient charm and originality to travel widely.
Play Dead! begins with a memorial dedication to the director’s father Irwin, also a diabetic, who died in 2022. Irwin features prominently in a brisk pre-credits montage sequence, initially healthy and cheerful, playing with his granddaughters, then fading away in a hospital bed. This scene plays like a warning to Lancit, the ghost of Christmas Future. He is also haunted by grisly memories of his uncle Harvey, another family member with chronic diabetes, who eventually lost limbs and eyesight to the disease.
In its opening stages, Play Dead! unfolds in relatively straight docu-verite style, with Lancit mostly engaged in domestic routine with his French wife Blandine and two daughters, Madeleine and Liora, Their conversations about his diabetes are often sidelined by unrelated background observations of their Parisian milieu: construction workers remodeling their apartment building, protestors running wild in the streets below, lyrically filmed outings to woodland walks and lake swims.
The director has a huge asset here in his two winningly cute young daughters, both natural screen performers. The girls are initially happy to play along when he begins processing his diabetes dread in the form of dressing-up games for the camera, but they gradually turn more reluctant, apparently unsettled by the underlying connection with their father’s real health issues. “I don’t want to do any more vampire and vampire’s daughter,” Madeleine confesses with a heartbreaking edge of apology. “You can do it with somebody else, or just you…”
These play-acting skits turn increasingly dark when Lancit moves from theatrical scary-movie kitsch to the more visceral, nerve-jangling language of body horror. First the hints are subtle: finding strange lumps on his skin, for example, or unspooling a freakishly long coil of string from inside his insulin patch. Later they take on a genuinely creepy physical dimension, his eyes becoming sinister blanks, his forehead oozing thick white goo, and more. David Cronenberg’s influence on his fellow Canadian film-makers should not be underestimated.
Without getting too deeply into spoilers, Play Dead! ends with a particularly bizarre docu-fiction chapter. Inexplicably abandoned by his family in their now-empty apartment, Lancit becomes entangled with a sickly puppet doppelgänger. On a logical level, it makes minimal sense, but as an unsettling projection of the director’s inner anguish, this is an inspired detour into nightmarish surrealism, with echoes of vintage ventriloquist screen shockers like Dead of Night (1945) and Magic (1978).
Less charitable viewers might find Play Dead! a rambling, self-indulgent and (literally) navel-gazing exercise. But this is an unavoidably personal film, more artfully assembled than it initially appears, with universal themes behind its singular case-study focus. Impressively sticking within his DIY home-movie format, Lancit manages to address some heavyweight truths here, about how illness and death are essentially real-life horror films, eternal human fears that helped spawn a vast literary and cinematic genre.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Matthew Lancit
Editing: Ariane Mellet
Producer: Simon P.R. Bewick
Sound: Jules Wisocki
Music: Etienne Nicolas
Production companies: Quilombo Films (France), Tajine Studio (France), Duplacena (Portugal)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (Camera Lucida)
In English, French
80 minutes
