Shot on grainy 16mm and scored by loopy, synth approximations of classical instruments, Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail sets up a dialectical battle between the analog and the digital, the past and the present, the solitary and the communal, and even Black and white. The latter gets a bracing introduction in the film’s cold open, in which a Black man, bound at the hands and feet, chains dragging underneath him, bloodied and drenched in sweat, crawls through the front door of a house to a mailbox at the edge of the road. Just as he manages to slip the letter in his hands into the box, a White man comes behind him and strikes him across the back of the head.
The letter inevitably finds its way to the Glen Haven post office, where workers Ann and Bess (Micki Jackson and Susan Priver, respectively) wonder whether its huge red stains and “Help me” scrawled on the front is just some prank. Like they do with other unidentified mail, they give it to Jasper (Thomas Boykin), the solitary, almost mystical “dead mail” investigator in charge of tracking down unknown senders. Jasper is another of the film’s lonely men, with a methodical approach to his work and a subdued demeanor. His lifestyle — which includes residing in a downtown men’s community, something between a shelter and hostel — his aversion to new technology (such as the office copy machine), and a love of model-making make him the perfect foil to the technology-obsessed man he sets out to find.
Trent (John Fleck), the man who struck the bound man, also chases down the letter and, through some careful inquiry, discovers who is in charge of tracking down the sources of dead letters. The inevitable meeting between the vengeful Trent and unsuspecting Jasper has its own shocking conclusion, which is best left unspoiled. But their meeting allows for the film’s narrative structure to take some liberties. A flashback to an unspecified point in time sees Trent entering a synthesizer engineers marketplace, where he meets Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.), an idealist with dreams of making the world’s most accurate synthesizer. Trent takes a shine to Josh’s enthusiasm and offers to help him out.
The care with which DeBoer and McConaghy shape Josh and Trent’s dynamic is admirable. It plays out like a patron and his benefactor, at times endearing and sweet, at others paternalistic, and sometimes verging on sexual. Trent bears an intense interest in Josh’s technical prowess that borders on the obsessive, crucial given a past relationship to another man who also bore specific expertise to which he aspired. In particular, the directors’ portrait of Trent, whose tendencies to obsess and overthink (and his eventual violence) make him an easy target for scorn, is never apathetic. Trent admits to feeling unseen and underappreciated, which makes Josh’s potential move to Japan to work for a synthesizer manufacturing company a tough pill to swallow; after all, he tells Josh at the lowest point in their crumbling relationship, it was another talented young man long ago who left him alone with his inadequacies. That Trent struggles with feeling unseen and underappreciated is ironic, given the people against whom his character is set in the story, namely women and people of color. The critique is hard to miss, but thankfully it doesn’t bludgeon the viewer.
Any more detail would spoil the story, which in turns delivers an expectedly thrilling, and unexpectedly moving, ode to public servants whose work often goes unheralded, a fact which DeBoer and McConaghy make explicit in the story. For a film whose greatest strength is in exploiting the possibilities when opposites collide, it makes sense that the film’s expected, but not unsatisfying, end comes when its two storylines finally converge. Safe to say, where justice technically fails in Dead Mail, humanity doesn’t.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
