Jacques Kluger

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) When some genres go bad, they truly turn rancid. Horror, alas, is one of those genres — there seems to be no limit to how low horror can go when it’s incompetently handled. I suppose that within a genre often showing the worst of what humanity has to offer, bad horror can become undistinguishable from actual psychopathy. Fortunately, Play or Die manages to avoid that last final rung on the badness scale — but that only barely excuses how a dull escape room dark mystery turns to gory torture horror to eventually end up in incompetent storytelling by the time the climax rolls by. The opening of the film does have a kernel of interest, as a computer-based mystery has an estranged couple reuniting to solve it. This holds up for a few minutes before people are captured and tortured in increasingly gory ways, clearly pandering to the horror crowd after a more restrained opening. But wait, there’s more! Because just as we’re settling for the climax, here come a few more narrative curveballs, as we discover that the protagonist and antagonist are the same (what?) and that it’s all a big sadistic plan to get back together with his girlfriend (what?) and that this is all explained by a horrifying childhood at the hands of a domineering mother that is shown at length just as the climax rolls by (what?), especially her murder at the other end of a screwdriver, which she considers to be her son’s rite of passage (what?)  In other words — the ending self-destructs in somewhat spectacular fashion, not being beholden to any specific rule for good screenwriting, like economy of character, good structure or foreshadowing. The film, co-written and directed by Jacques Kluger, is reportedly adapted from Puzzle, a novel by Frank Thilliez, so maybe the source material is to blame — although I can’t find a good plot summary of the book to judge. [June 2025: French Wikipedia provides the plot summary and while the screenwriters aren’t innocent, they’re not blameless either.] Still, no matter who screwed up, Play or Die is simply a failure — so many people should have intervened to make this a better film, but then again this is horror: the worst instincts of horror creators often operate on a very different wavelength as more casual viewers, while leaving everyone looking embarrassed when they turn bad.