Dead Mail
Sometime in the 1980s, bespectacled black guy Josh (Sterling Macer Jr) struggles to crawl from an isolated house – he’s tied, chained and bloody – to shove a bit of cardboard with a scrawled, incomplete message about being kidnapped into a mailbox. His captor drags him back inside. Later, the scrap of mail – presumed to be a macabre prank – is passed by postal workers Bess (Susan Priver) and Ann (Micki Jackson) onto the desk of near-homeless boffin Jasper (Tomas Boykin), who has the the backup (an internet pioneer-snooper in Norway), the maps and reference books and determination to sleuth out delivery addresses from slimmer material than this … but kidnapper Trent (John Fleck) is equally obsessive, detail-oriented and meticulous, and as desperate to get back that makeshift postcard as Jasper is to puzzle it out.
Written and directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, Dead Mail is an exercise in skewed nostalgia – apart from anything else, for a postal service with this much nous and sense of mission – which almost plays out as a prehistoric cyber-thriller as the investigators have to delve into a mystery with just the rudiments of the tech successors would have at their disposal. It turns out that the initial crime – which hinges on obsession and whimsy – is also to do with the early days of an electronic field, as Josh is struggling – with soldering iron and tubes of adhesive – to come up with a synthesiser patch which will reproduce a woodwind sound. It’s told out of order, with a grabby hook, a long flashback, dovetailing scenes of perpetrator, victim and investigation, and an effective working-up of suspense mechanics. The drab, brownish 1980s look – and a lot of period-accurate tech and clothes – reflects the decade as it actually was rather than the garish way it tended to be represented in film.
It’s low-key eccentric, with characters whose motivations are refreshingly pure if strange – an incidental jobsworth at the post office is just the sort who’d made ‘going postal’ a popular expression, and it’s all too easy to pin some extra crimes on him. Without giving anyone much in the way of backstory – though it uses a spin on the ‘where are they now’ ending complete with snapshots of the ‘real’ characters – it’s a satisfying drama, with quite affecting non-romantic relationships among the postal workers and even initially between psycho and victim. Fleck, one of those you-know-the-face actors, has been playing bit parts in TV and film since the early 1980s – he’s in, among other, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Howard the Duck, Mutant on the Bounty, The Naked Gun ½ , Falling Down, Waterworld, Velvet Buzzsaw and True Blood; he’s excellent in a rare lead role, as a nuanced psycho, who steps further and further over moral lines for understandable reasons without descending to blubbing for our sympathy. His ‘oil drum’ monologue is liable to wind up as an actor’s audition piece/exercise.
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