Come Play a Stupid Game and Win Stupid Prizes

Come Play is not the playful horror film one might hope for given such a title. Written and directed by newcomer Jacob Chase, Come Play is a fairly joyless tale. The film opens on Oliver (Azhy Robertson), a non-verbal autistic boy lying in bed when his smartphone calls out to him. We will learn later that Oliver uses this smartphone to communicate with his parents and other people. Whomever has reached out to Oliver in the opening very quickly becomes a dark caller with seeming monstrous intent.

The scene ends with Oliver screaming in fear as his mother Sarah (Jillian Jacobs) rushes in to calm him down and assure him he only had a nightmare. Oliver knows better. After all, we saw what he saw on the smartphone. An app titled “Misunderstood Monsters” that tells the tale of Larry a lonely monster seems to be able to transport Larry from cell phone to reality. Even so, as an audience we must now go through the motions.

We must watch Sarah argue with her husband Marty (John Gallagher Jr.), watch Oliver be tense about their tension and we watch Oliver at school, or at the speech therapy session. Chase takes these mundane scenes and uses it as a cudgel. He takes the idea of obligatory exposition and with steady dull thuds hammers away at his audience. We do watch Oliver’s bully’s, in which the primary bully Winslow Fegley as Byron take Oliver’s smartphone and toss it in the weeds.

This seems to handle the problem of Larry the misunderstood monster. But wait…there’s more. We’ve learned in these scenes of exposition that Marty has a crap job. We’ve watched Marty in a few scenes packing boxes with heavy implication he’s moving out.While at work as a parking attendant one night, we watch Marty in his booth going through a box of things he took with him. In that box is an iPad. Uh-oh.

Chase is actually inventive when showing us the consequence of finding the iPad. All alone in a booth in a parking lot with only a few cars parked, wind blowing ominously, Marty struggles to fix the flickering light. Outside his booth the wind whips up loose papers blown from out of the booth. These papers all swirl around and then stick to the unseen monster Larry. Alas, nothing comes of that and so Marty returns home only with the iPad.

Because Dr. Robyn (Eboni Booth) the speech therapist has urged Sarah to have a sleep over for Oliver so he can socialize, for some reason Sarah has Oliver’s bullies over. Well, at least the iPad is there and Larry the Misunderstood Monster around to throw a monkey wrench into that potential disaster. Byron has found the iPad the mute and terrified Oliver has hidden. Naturally, Larry the monster attacks Byron. The terrified bully’s at this sleepover all blame the silent Oliver for this attack.

What’s plainly missing is any sense of play at all from the lonely Monster named Larry. He’s simply malevolent and this is a shame. As we grow up and face the cold cruel world in front of us we tend to forget the importance of play. Children can be great teachers in this importance. Chase doesn’t seem to care about this. He makes no effort to comment on play at all, but as Hamlet once pointed out; “The play is the thing.”

Had Chase bothered to explore the nature of play Come Play could have been a top notch horror film. As it stands it is merely average. What a shame. All the way to the schmaltzy end there is never any sense of play. Only a monster serving as a metaphor for the cold cruel world of adults.