A Film a Week - Play Dead! / Fait le mort!

 previously published on Cineuropa

Many things define our inner and outer life, and illness is definitely one of them. When it is chronic and possibly life-threatening, like diabetes, it severely affects our way of life, our habits, our decisions and our mindset. Parisian-based Canadian filmmaker Matthew Lancit has been suffering from diabetes since childhood, and one would think that he has already adapted to the condition. However, his third feature-length documentary, Play Dead!, which premiered in the Camera Lucida sidebar of DOK Leipzig, contradicts that notion.

On the surface, the movie seems like the filmmaker’s personal diary of his fear of dying from diabetes, which, after all, would not be so strange, since Lancit demonstrated his fascination with morbid subject matter in his feature-length debut, Funeral Season (2010), as well as his affinity for keeping a personal diary, of sorts, with his second effort, Flâneurs: Street Ramblers (2016). However, Play Dead!, in its complete absence of anything didactic regarding the approach, is a very different kind of animal.

Lancit opens it conventionally by giving us the reason for filming it in the first place: the death of his father and his role in taking care of him during his last days. The cause of his father’s passing is never disclosed, but in Matthew’s life, there is another ghost that haunts him: his uncle Harvey, with whom he shares the diagnosis and who died a terrible death when our filmmaker-protagonist was young. We shall not see the man physically in the film, but we will learn a lot about him and will feel his presence in Matthew’s life, as a cautionary tale, a ghost and a source of inspiration for the morbid games that Matthew plays.

However, he is not alone in this. He is married to Blandine, who plays along, but with less enthusiasm, and the couple has two daughters, the eldest of whom starts to show an aversion to her father’s morbid sense of humour and elaborate ways of laying bare his obsession with death. They play zombies and vampires, and Matthew explains his interpretation of one of the greatest Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, as a rehearsal for death. Is his obsession so strong that he cannot let it go (the illness is definitely real, as Blandine remembers his characteristic odour), or is Matthew playing all these games and taking them to extremes (which are too good to spoil) so as to shock his entourage?

Although Play Dead! started out as a personal documentary of a filmed-diary kind, it develops into something very different, as Lancit, serving as the filmmaker, cinematographer, sound recordist and co-editor, introduces some experimental moments before turning the whole thing into a horror story, of sorts. He uses the location of his own Paris flat and the notion of confinement to smartly reference works by different auteurs, from Chantal Akerman to Roman Polanski (especially the “apartment” trilogy), while also introducing body-horror notions from the master of the sub-genre, David Cronenberg.

A lot of effort has also been put into the special effects and make-up (kudos to David Scherer, Anne Van Nyen and Florence Thonet, who handled this), the original score (Etiene Nicolas masterfully utilises riffs on electric guitar and an electronic drone to ramp up the tension) and the puppeteering work by Natacha Belova, while principal editor Ariane Mellet keeps up the pace and the clarity for the pleasant 80 minutes of running time. In the end, Play Dead! might seem like a free-flowing, cheeky, shocking and slightly odd horror documentary, but this does not prevent it from also seeming personal and sincere.