A horror thriller movie called Play Dead, starring Bailee Madison and Jerry O’Connell, came out last year in 2022 and managed to mildly impress its audience. Directed by Patrick Lussier and written by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason, we are going to do a deep dive into this movie, so continue reading if you’re curious to know more about Play Dead and its ending.
The movie revolves around a student named Chloe, played by Bailee Madison, a college student who gets sucked deep into some twisted business no one was supposed to know about. To dig deep into whatever happened to her brother, Chloe takes extreme measures and ends up faking her own death and entering a morgue.
Gone there only to get her hands on some evidence, Chloe somehow ends up finding that the coroner who works there is involved in some creepy business with some even creepier customers. This horror thriller is a journey of Chloe’s horrific findings and how she decides to get to the bottom of it all.
Apart from our main leads, Bailee Madison and Jerry O’Connell, the movie also has Anthony Turpel as T.J., Chris Lee as Ross, Chris Butler as a sheriff, Jorge Luis-Pallo as Mannix, and Kyler O’Neal as Randy.
O’Connell and Madison manage to do well with their characters, and the plot of the movie also has managed to take common fears and turn them into something horrific, making it a clean and sharp horror.
Play Dead Movie Ending Explained
The movie is a fast-paced thriller that keeps its viewers on edge, satisfying our curiosities by not giving us much time to raise questions. Play Dead introduces us to our two leading characters, a sibling duo including Chloe and T.J., who have been fighting to survive every day.
We figure that they have lost their father recently and were left to fend for themselves. Chloe is revealed to be just a student, and T.J. is also not of much help. The two are neck-deep in problems, most of them related to money or the lack of it.
They have hospital bills to pay, feed themselves, and pay off their college tuition fees; their home is at stake and about to be snatched from them, and they have absolutely no money to take care of it all. Another cruel fact that adds to their sad state is that the insurance company refused to give them the insurance money after their father’s passing because the latter’s death was ruled to be suicide.
With a thousand different problems thrown their way all at once and absolutely no money to handle, even one of them, the two turn desperate to get money no matter what. The increasing medical bills, along with other financial issues and the fact that their home might not remain with them for long, are likely to induce a kind of fear that pushes one to do all kinds of things.
T.J. & Ross’ Plan
Sick of living in fear and distress, T.J. pulls the courage to do something extremely foolish in a last attempt to fix things for his family. With his best friend Ross, he decides to attempt a robbery, and the two plan their actions. They planned on robbing a dispensary by holding everyone in it at that moment at gunpoint.
The plan seemed plausible, and they set to work. Ross was the one who took the initiative to be the one to go inside the shop while T.J. waited inside the car, with his hands on the wheel, ready to take off once his friend was done. But things obviously went horribly wrong.
Turns out Ross had a fake gun in his hand, whereas the shopowner had a real one. As Ross threatened to give him the money, the owner immediately grabbed his own real gun and shot Ross down. This was followed by the owner aiming for T.J.’s car, which forced the boy to run from the place, leaving his friend alone.
T.J. does all he can think of in terms of destroying the evidence that could relate him to robbery. At first, he thinks he has taken care of everything, but it is only later he realizes that his friend, Ross, has enough evidence on his own to lead the police to him. But Ross was dead, and his body would probably be in the morgue.
Chloe’s Genius Plan
T.J. reveals everything to his sister, who vows to protect her brother, coming up with her own twisted plan to get her hands on the phone and save his brother from going to jail. In an attempt to reach the body before the police, Chloe finds a way to enter the morgue, where the body might be, by faking a drug overdose.
The plan was simple: fake her death, enter the morgue, get the phone, and find a way out. But this plan also ends up going wrong when Chloe realizes that the coroner she is stuck with happens to be a terrifying monster involved in some super shady business.
Not only this but when the coroner finds out that Chloe is not a dead person and was alive the entire time and may have figured out his truth, he resolves not to let her get out of the morgue building alive. The bone-chilling truth behind this seemingly normal coroner that Chloe ends up accidentally finding is that this man does not just perform autopsies on dead bodies.
Turns out he has a full-fledged business where he sells organs from the dead to people in the black market who are ready to pay a hefty price. The entire plot of Chloe getting her hands on propofol to pass out under a bridge for the paramedics to think that she is, after all, a drug overdose victim is ridiculous and slightly takes away from the realistic aspect of the film because you keep questioning the legitimacy of it all.
You think there would surely be better ways for the two to get the mobile, pretend overdosing is just silly because you are likely to be taken to the hospital for a check-up or some other efforts and tests would be done on you to confirm the diagnosis instead of the paramedics arriving and throwing you into one of the morgue cells.
They want us to think that an overdose victim is just grabbed and put in the morgue without any prior check-ups or resuscitation attempts, which is outright ridiculous. Even if we believe it to be true and focus on the rest of the story, then all there is left for it to offer is a game of catch me if you can, where Chloe is trying not to be caught, and the coroner has no plans of leaving her alone.
The Coroner’s Truth
While in the morgue, Chloe finds out about the coroner’s organ trafficking business, and the latter finds out about the former’s breach into his carefully built front. The coroner gets the required organs from the dead bodies as they come and passes them on to another guy, who is responsible for the eventual delivery of the product.
This business is great for them and brings them good money, but with Chloe entering the picture, their small business might be busted. After spending some more time in the morgue, Chloe comes across Ross, the man she was here for, only to find out that he was not dead.
He was lying on a slab and looked horrible. He had hastily done stitches on the one side where his kidney was supposed to be. Turns out that he had never died and that the police officer who was present at the site of the incident was also involved in the organ business.
In fact, he was the one getting these semi-alive bodies sent to the morgue, not telling anybody that they were actually alive and could get better if taken to the hospital. The police officer supplied the bodies to the coroner, and it was at the morgue that Ross had lost one of his kidneys. The coroner had passed his kidney to the middle guy and stitched him up roughly.
Chloe finds herself deeper into the rabbit hole, even coming across a basement that had a bunch of people, all alive but missing part of their bodies, trapped there waiting for the coroner to come around to have at some other part of their bodies.
Running For Life
Realizing that the place is not at all safe, Chloe runs to Ross, grabs him, and makes a run out of the building, but the coroner catches a hint and locks the building, trapping the two. He manages to knock them unconscious, bringing them back to where they were, tying Chloe to a chair, and putting Ross back on the slab.
When Chloe wakes up once again, she begs the coroner to leave the two alone and to let them go, but to no avail. Instead, the coroner gaslights her into thinking that she is just trying to save the two to get good karma in to cancel out her crimes. The coroner opens Ross once again and takes out what he needs, a liver, the lack of which kills Ross on the spot.
The Ending Explained
A traumatized Chloe escapes after the coroner leaves, somehow finding the phone that Ross and the fake gun he had carried during the robbery.
Chloe contacts T.J. immediately, and he arrives at the morgue with the beat cop with him. Eventually, all front gets dropped, and everybody knows who’s who. The siblings try to run but fail. Chloe does her best to distract the cop and the coroner, wanting T.J. to run, but it all leads to nothing.
After going through hell, Chloe manages to kill the cop and runs out, only to have the coroner run after her. A fight ensues, which has a lot of taunting remarks and savage efforts to end the other, and thankfully, Chloe manages to kill the coroner by putting a knife into his skull, enjoying and laughing at the sound the knife makes when it comes into contact with his head.
The movie finally ends with the cop and the corner dead, the sibling duo escaping with the middle guy in his car riding off into the sunset, with Chloe having done her job of getting the evidence to the end.
The movie is silly and tries to make sense out of a ridiculous-sounding plot. No character in the movie is completely black or white, instead, they all linger in a little grey area with a little psychopath in them. While the organ business is a very real thing, even the brutality of it all, the stupidity of the coroner, the cop, T.J., and her sister’s plan take away from the seriousness of the film.
