Playing Dead

A man, half-melted into the wallpaper of his own marriage, stages his extinction so that the woman who once shared his pillow can breathe beside another; the film unspools like a fever dream of white gloves, mourning crepe, and the metallic taste of self-erasure. James, a silhouette of Victorian rectitude, watches his wife’s pupils dilate whenever the postman’s knock ricochets through the hall; each echo is a small detonation under his ribcage. In response he engineers a disappearance so baroque it borders on sacrament: a forged telegram, an empty rowboat drifting downriver, a suit of clothes laid out on the pier like shed snakeskin. The camera lingers on the negative space where a body should be—an absence more corporeal than flesh itself. Meanwhile Alice, luminous in her uncertainty, drifts through drawing rooms that feel suddenly rented, fingering the collar of a husband who no longer occupies his own name. When the presumed rival—a man whose moustache is waxed into two immaculate boomerangs—offers her a future, she tastes ashes. The film’s coup de théâtre arrives when James, coffined behind a two-way mirror in a rented room, beholds his own funeral; candlelight carves his cheekbones into gargoyles while the widow’s veil turns his wife’s face into a moon he can never again land upon. In the final reel the living corpse steps out of the shadows, exposing the hollowness of sacrifice: love cannot be transplanted like a geranium; it dies of exposure. The last shot—wife and husband framed in separate windows of the same house—freezes into a diptych of mutual hauntology, a marriage preserved only as a pair of afterimages flickering on the edge of vision.