Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s a decent 15-minute short located somewhere in there, but owing to the puzzling obligations of narrative to its subtext, it’s become six times longer, and correspondingly thinner. Like Mimi Cave’s debut Fresh some two years earlier, The Dead Thing deals with the ever-present frustrations, not to say paranoia, of securing a good date in the modern world. At best, it seems, the sex is lifeless and the love fleeting; at worst, he’s a psycho killer with a woman-hating bent. But the similarities end there, as Kane’s film isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. A passionate, if ham-fisted, diatribe against serial creeps and stalker behavior would have at least spun a clean thematic web upon which the viewer may — no matter how cursorily — tread. Gore and guts, likewise, would titillate the hounds of horror, whether committed freaks or curious edgelords, and provide the spectacle so fundamental to horror’s enterprise. Neither extreme holds up in our case, and all for the worse.
At the film’s heart is the inability to find a stable relationship, and this affliction is borne by Alex (Blu Hunt), a taciturn and wavy-haired young woman whose several one-night stands on a dating app — “Friktion” — yield only emptiness and a shallow yearning for more. She’s got a handle on her life for the most part, working at some kind of graphic design agency (though curiously almost always at night) and bed-surfing at her friend Cara’s (Katherine Hughes) apartment. But this is L.A., and all attempts to get something more invariably have to stem from the same few bars, sipping the same overpriced cocktails and rehearsing the same tired icebreakers. So when Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), sporting a buzzcut and a seductive if generic smile, hazards a change of pace (“We don’t really need to talk, do we?”) with her, it’s a green light for Alex, whose only other regular male presence in her life comes from her creepy and cringeworthy co-worker Mark (Joey Millin) and — occasionally — Cara’s ex, Paul (Brennan Mejia).
Naturally, Kyle isn’t all what he seems — indeed, he’s not even all there. Worried that she might’ve been ghosted by him after several nights together, Alex pays his workplace a visit, only to learn the ugly truth. Yet little else changes, aside from a co-worker replacement — Chris (John Karna), infinitely friendlier — and Kyle coming back into her arms, aware of his predicament and having exposed, in a way, his malevolent tendencies. But try as Hunt may to imbue her character with an aptly listless disposition, the same can’t be said of Kyle, who comes off as a comically confused man-child who clings to Alex relentlessly, kills several people with little motive, and even does a Tommy Wiseau impression at one point when she finally calls it quits. More damning than bad acting, however, is bad writing: there are little stakes in the game, little moralizing to be gleaned from Kyle’s aggression, except for perhaps the faintest hint of a “hurt people hurt people” message. The Dead Thing appears content to coast along as a mood-piece, relying wholly on low-light cinematography and an ominous cliché of a score (that doesn’t always fit the tone) to engender its brooding sensibility. Strip both away, and what remains is, true to its title, deader than a doornail.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 3.
