As Carlos Goitia’s low-budget horror movie opens, we begin in medias res as a woman (Paula Brasca) wakes up in a standard murder basement: muted decor, very little natural light, a sturdy workbench with an impressive array of rusty tools, various masks made of skin. She immediately realises she is lying in a pile of corpses – all mutilated women. She herself is badly injured. Not a happy awakening for the character, but it’s not a bad jumping-off point for a horror movie.
In short order, the killer (Damian Castillo) heaves into view. Naturally, he’s an absolutely massive man in a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-type get-up – and our heroine very sensibly plays dead. This is a creepy and interesting conceit – how long is she going to be able to keep up the pretence? What happens once he rumbles the ruse? Unfortunately, Goitia can’t quite assemble enough material to keep the “what if you had to pretend to be dead?” idea in play for a whole feature film, and proceedings start to feel thin and stretched at a point where there is still plenty of movie left to play out.
Play Dead inevitably ends up having to leave the murder basement, and while this opening up of the single-site world of the film is very welcome by the time it happens, it also serves to dissipate the creepy claustrophobia of the initial premise. The plot becomes loopier and although this film is not trying to do anything that hasn’t worked perfectly well in other, better horror movies, the technique of piling on trope after trope (including out-of-context 1950s pop music, creepy elderly relative, evidence of murderous dysfunction stretching back decades) doesn’t result in something that cumulatively becomes scarier. Instead, the layering of one creepy thing on to another creates a sense of silliness rather than terror, leaving you with the sense that Coco Chanel’s maxim about the perils of over-accessorising – “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” – also applies to writing and editing horror movies.
• Play Dead is on digital platforms on 9 March.
