GOING SLOWLY INTO THE NIGHT // A FILM REVIEW OF “THE DEAD THING”
BY MATEO MORENO
THE DEAD THING, Shudder’s new slow-burn horror/drama, is sort of an anti-valentine’s day film. Which makes it funny that it’s premiering on Valentine’s Day. Blu Hunt plays Alex, a young woman who works at a boring office job. Not many people work this shift with her. In fact, we usually only see one other person with her. Mark (Joey Millin) is her first deskmate, the type of clingy guy who sees a woman ant thinks there’s “something between them” just because she makes a joke to him once. It’s a drone of a job, boring repeated repetition and Alex is burned out with the monotony. When she’s not working, she’s scrolling through a tinder-like dating app and goes on date after date, mindlessly hooking up in an emotion-less kind of way. Eventually she gets matched with Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), a good looking guy who has a dog with him on his profile pic. This stands out to her, charms her even, and she swipes right. Their date is different than the others: she’s actually finding a connection. After they hook up, they talk and joke and snuggle. Could this be an actual connection? But of course, things can’t just be that simple and when she reaches out to him, he doesn’t respond. So she goes to his work and finds an eerie and bizarre roadblock. Eventually he does respond but doesn’t remember her. She’s still drawn to him, but something is wrong. Is he an actual person? Is he dead? As Alex falls deeper and deeper into this bizarre connections, things twist and turn into a strange labyrinth of unanswered questions, questions that may not want to be answered.
THE DEAD THING has a lot going for it. It has a David Lynch-ian vibe to the entire film, a dreamlike feel that keeps you off-edge. And Blu Hunt gives a strong lead performance, one that really pulls us into her feelings of off-balance and confusion. And yes, this is a slow burn kind of film, which I really enjoyed for the first half hour or so. Then it stops feeling like a slow-burn film and more like a meandering one, one that just keeps coasting along with half-scenes and the whiff of a unfinished screenplay. There’s not much horror in this horror until the end, which is fine. The creepiness definitely can suffice. But the story doesn’t service the creepiness of the vibe, nor does it support Hunt’s strong presence here. Instead it is filled with half-baked characters, ridiculous twists and non-sensical “scares.” Kyle’s character is rather one-note (though Smith-Petersen does what he can with it) and the mystery of his character (or the central mystery itself) is never actually explained. And not in the way of leaving a bit of mystery. It comes off as something that is simply never developed well. What starts as a intriguing look into the perils of online dating mixed with supernatural suspense ends up being a frustrating film with a good idea and a moody tmosphere. One that sadly goes nowhere.
GRADE: C-
WRITTEN BY Elric Kane, Webb Wilcoxen DIRECTED BY Elric Kane STARRING Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, Katherine Hughes, John Karna, Brennan Mejia, Joey Millin, Aerial Washington. NOW STREAMING ON SHUDDER