The Big Picture

The Dead Thing
effectively portrays the horrors of modern dating and urban life.
Blu Hunt delivers an excellent performance, elevating the film with charisma and nuance.
The film’s strong tone and atmosphere are impactful, but the final act leaves much to be desired.

Modern dating is the worst, a constant parade of app-swiping, new introductions, and vapid small talk that rarely seems to result in a deeper connection. At least that’s how Alex (Blu Hunt) feels as she navigates the infinite wasteland of the dating world. It’s merely a parade of useless, app-driven flings until she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Peterson), a charmer of a man who gives Alex her first vibrant connection in some time. Kyle disappears after the pair spend a beautiful night together, seemingly off the face of the Earth, provoking a hunt for him that’s as mysterious as its consequences are odd and otherworldly. The discoveries evolve into something truly menacing, with tension that escalates well while Alex’s fate becomes dangerously entwined with Kyle’s own.

Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing packs an unsettling tone and real moments of insight into its lean runtime. It capably demonstrates the ghastly routine of life and love in the city, captured as an infinite regurgitation of identical experiences entrapping Alex like a fly in an inescapable web. Blu Hunt carries the film with nuance and gravitas (despite playing a character stuck in humdrum monotony), while Ben Smith-Peterson also delivers a strong performance. The film loses some of its careful construction as it goes along, with both the finale and certain plot trajectories not feeling quite earned. Still, The Dead Thing is nonetheless an outing worth watching.

The Dead Thing (2024) In this neo-realist take on an Invisible Man story, a young woman trapped in meaningless connections falls for a charismatic man who harbors a dark secret. Their affair spirals into a dangerous obsession, blending modern urban legend with psychological horror.Release Date July 26, 2024 Director Elric Kane Cast Blu Hunt , Ben Smith-Petersen , John Karna , Katherine Hughes , Joey Millin , Brennan Mejia , Aerial Washington , Josh Marble

What is ‘The Dead Thing’ about?
Courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival

Alex isn’t leading a vibrant life. Her day job involves a lot of scanning in a largely silent office building while the city’s asleep. The rest of her time seems to be a barrage of attempts at human connection through the dating app Friktion (whose name is a bad sign for a dating app, since it implies discord). Meet, drink, fuck, repeat. When she connects with the mysterious Kyle, it’s a breath of fresh city air as the two have an unforgettable long night of pleasure, talking, and connection. It’s odd, then, when Kyle ghosts her, leading Alex on a slightly obsessive hunt to discover where Kyle could have possibly gone. It’s worse when she finally finds him: on another date, seeming not to remember her at all. As it turns out, something terrible and supernatural happened to the young lover that both Kyle and Alex needed to square. They gradually reconnect, but their rekindled relationship begins to dominate her life, just as Kyle becomes ever more dangerous in the life of his new beau.

There have certainly been some exceptional films about the horrors of modern flings and dating. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows warns about the dangers of STDs. Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation chides audiences for even considering that dinner party invitation. Get Out plays off (here, well-founded) fears of meeting one’s partner’s family, while The Lodge is a stark exploration of the abject terror of being stuck watching their kids. The Dead Thing explores both the terrible monotony of the dating world and the horrors of app-based dating–being ghosted is bad, but connecting may be worse. It’s a stark reminder that there are things you just can’t know about the person at the other end of that swipe.

‘The Dead Thing’ Is an Engaging Watch That Still Leaves Too Many Questions
Image courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival

What director Elric Kane accomplishes perhaps the most successfully in The Dead Thing is the subtle feeling that ‘The City’ is a sort of liminal space, perpetually dark, and deeply repetitive. It’s a bleak vision that underscores the headspace of the protagonist before supernatural moments even arrive: Alex isn’t dead, but isn’t she? She certainly seems to feel like it. It’s a strong exploration of our modern dating malaise, though the idea’s inspiration is worn a little too clearly on its sleeve. It showcases Alex’s disdain for her usual life, the monotony of her routine and her lack of connection, clearly and immediately. Her first conversation with Kyle sees the young woman directly ask him “Do you ever feel like there’s just no escape?” What makes this theme land is the clever monotony of the cinematography and editing, an endless assortment of identical encounters, a humdrum work life, and a city that’s never light or vibrant (at least as far as we can see). It’s oppressive, and The Dead Thing captures that feeling well.

Alex may spend most of the film locked in a disquieted haze, but Blu Hunt portrays the character with charisma, a certain je ne sais quoi that elevates the film as a whole. The performance is complex, jaded but desirous of passion, and gives needed layers to the character to land a streamlined narrative that rests so heavily on her alone in monotonous moments. Ben Smith-Petersen’s Kyle is mysterious and engaging while also landing the character’s growing menace, obsession, and certain realizations driving him into unstable territory. The pair have chemistry in their shared screen time, and the resultant intoxicating mutual obsession is believable because of it. As Alex’s coworker Chris, John Carna also exhibits an easy, likable charm once he enters the narrative. It’s a film with a slow, steady pace, where horrors are revealed in subtleties, and the cast as a whole deftly handles the material.

Related ‘House of Sayuri’ Review: A Tone-Bending House of Horrors and Revenge | Fantasia 2024 Moving is already hard even without the ghosts.

Where The Dead Thing stumbles is its handling of certain plot developments stemming from what befell Kyle and the mutual obsession between him and Alex. Its introduction to Kyle portrays him in a sympathetic light… it’s easy to understand their mutual attraction. When Kyle has an earth-shattering revelation, however, he pivots immediately into a character with an entirely different set of attributes, becoming more possessive and less hinged as the narrative goes along. It’s fine, of course, for a character to be on a downward spiral, but some of his choices are wildly sudden escalations that fail to have an intuitive or clear motive or connection to his character as established prior. As a consequence, major moments of escalation feel somewhat random. It’s possible to chalk them up to simple obsession, but Kyle’s given backstory still doesn’t adequately explain his motivations for certain major actions. Additionally, we often aren’t allowed to see the full consequences of those choices as they encroach on Alex and her psyche. When the film’s final, fateful ending plays out, it boasts a nice mirroring to her introduction and the themes that are initially set up, but there’s a lot of guessing needed as to the explanation behind her fate or what happens to another major character, and how those destinies connect. Like Kyle’s memory, the film leaves us with some important gaps.

‘The Dead Thing’ Boasts an Excellent Command of Tone, but Doesn’t Cohere at the End
Image courtesy of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing shows a remarkable command of tone, given that it’s the director’s first solo-directed feature. It’s moody and full of smart choices, bathing the audience in Alex’s malaise through smart cinematography and editing choices, revealing The City to be little more than purgatory for the technically living. It’s also carried considerably by Blu Hunt’s excellent performance and natural, easy charisma, which elevate every scene. Where the film falters is in an escalation that needs greater grounding, events that should feel like tragic, inevitable consequences but which, sadly, don’t. It’s a good film, and a journey worth experiencing, but there’s a coherence that’s regrettably missing from the third act, hampering a promising horror outing.

REVIEW The Dead Thing (2024) The Dead Thing shows a strong command of unsettling tone and a charismatic outing by Blu Hunt, but its finale needs greater care in the plotting and execution.ProsBlu Hunt has an excellent screen presence as the monotony-suffering Alex, and her chemistry with Ben Smith-Petersen works well.Elric Kane has a skillful command of tone, giving the film and its setting an appropriately bleak and claustrophobic feeling throughout. ConsKyle’s growing obsession and antagonism aren’t adequately grounded, dampening the finale’s logic and impact.Alex’s fate fits the narrative’s theme, but aspects of it (along with other elements of the end) require significant audience guesswork to land.

The Dead Thing had its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.