Sometimes, it’s okay to admit when you’re not okay; that is the message that Zen Pace pushes home in their emotional animated short film Play Again. This moving short tackles the idea of how core memories slowly help us heal and find strength within ourselves.
After just losing his father, Javi is distant and trudging through life. By chance, one night, as his mother is taking a double shift to pay the bills, he discovers the Xbox racing game he and his dad used to play. As memories flood back, he is transported into the game and finds himself racing a ghost car driven by his dad.
While primarily a film about grief, Play Again isn’t afraid to open itself to broaching a few more topics to be a multilayered short. We get moments about a young person not feeling as if the current environment of their hometown is too self-contained for their emotional needs. We see the struggles of a family who, generation by generation, is moving up the “class” system. Javi’s dad mentions how he never had a house like the one they lived in and never had his bedroom. Javi strikes out at his father’s job as a handyman, wanting him to be more than that, while mostly fearing that this is his future, one he simply refuses to accept as a possibility. He wants to climb, unlike (in his opinion) his father, who settled.
It’s quite interesting how these are fed into the story of Play Again. We see it as moments of regret on Javi’s side that he spoke to his father that way, but it is also about growth. Only his swipe at his father was potentially a crushing one due to his untimely death soon after. He is living with his demons and a tonne of guilt, and it is only in remembering those better times with his dad when he starts the game that he realises how, in some ways, his dad will always be with him. It’s beautiful and resonates with anyone who has lost a parent at a young age.
You have all of these things that are left unsaid, and all you have left to cling onto is memories, whether that is from voice notes or even in the tiny things like your loved one who has passed having a lap record in a silly game that you once played with them. It’s small things, but they matter so much more than you realise. The human connections and dire need to have requirements can be seen as ways of coping with grief. Still, it could also be about celebrating the life that was there and, in the end, that can be far more powerful than you could ever imagine.
Play Again is a sensitive but rewarding viewpoint on young people dealing with losing a loved one. It is a complex look at the love and life of a family that does not have the financial abilities to get through life as easily as some others, how something as simple as a video game can be the bridge to so many things in life, even grief—a marvellous short.
★★★ 1/2
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