Playing Dead

Playing Dead (Je fais le mort, 2013) is a dry French comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Jean, a forty-year-old actor whose career has flatlined, is so broke he'll take anything — and the job that finally lands is, fittingly, lying down dead.

The police hire him to stand in for murder victims during crime-scene reconstructions, holding the corpse's pose while detectives piece together what happened. Jean throws himself into it like a frustrated genius: he argues about the angle of the fall, demands motivation for the body, and drives the cops half-mad with notes. That obsessive eye pays off when he's pulled onto a high-profile case — a string of killings at the Megève ski resort, dead quiet in the off-season except for whoever is doing the killing.

François Damiens plays Jean with the deadpan awkwardness that made him a fixture of French comedy. The humor here is quiet and uncomfortable, built on the absurdity of the setup rather than gags. It's a film for anyone who likes low-key European comedies with a murder hook and an oddball at the center. Stream Playing Dead (2013) online on iFILM.