The Dead Thing
Director Elric Kane, who also co-wrote with Webb Wilcoxon, here makes a serious, sensitive, thought-provoking and disturbing film spun off from what could easily have been a joke premise … what if you were ghosted by a ghost? It opens with protagonist Alex (Blu Hunt, who was Moonstar in The New Mutants) drifting through a busy, empty life in hallucinatory fashion so we only pick up her situation gradually … she’s in a repetitive office job (as ‘scanner bitch’) and endlessly having one-night hook-ups on a dating app called Friktion … she has been temporarily living in the flat of her friend Cara (Katherine Hughes), who is an emotional basket case thanks to a called-off wedding … and she uses a sun-lamp in odd little private rituals though she lives in Los Angeles (one of the sunniest cities in the world).
Her drifting course brings her up against barista Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen, usually a stunt man), who she tags as a right guy because his profile pic includes a dog (someone else’s) and who seems different from her run of the mill shack buddies, making an emotional and sexual connection with her and apparently interested in a further relationship. Then, despite many texts and messages and frankly desperate pining, she hears nothing from him only to have a double shock … spotting him in a bar with another date and following them home and calling in at his place of work to learn that he was run over in the street and is dead. She makes another Friktion account and arranges to meet him, and the solid-seeming spectre doesn’t remember or recognise her … though it eventuates that Kyle was one kind of plausible not-nice guy when alive and has transformed into a more dangerous type in his current form as a perhaps-digital host still going through the motions and now prodded by Alex to question his afterlife the way she might have inspired him to break the cycle of his life – which leads to some slightly more conventional, no-less effective haunting/stalker developments in the third act.
It’s a fresh take on supernatural romance, with a topical spotlight on toxicity – on the one hand, Alex is in a downward spiral (there’s a backstory about how her friendship with Cara has become strained) swiping on commitment-phobic guys … on the other, Kyle’s physical rot as a ghost is paralleled by his all-consuming, controlling, dangerous selfishness. It’s a tight, claustrophobic film which leaves key incidents offscreen and doesn’t overdo the horrors – a long take of rom-com chat and spook story ghost attack in a swimming pool is more upsetting than the more conventional watery weirdness of Night Swim – but pays off with a lot of emotional weight. Hunt and Smith-Petersen are excellent in complex roles, and there’s good work from John Karna as a possible third wheel in the relationship.
Discussion
No comments yet.