DEAD MAIL - Mark Reviews Movies

Dead Mail, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 17, 2025

Co-writer/co-directors Joe De Boer and Kyle McConaghy begin Dead Mail with a compelling conceit. As the title suggests, it has to do with "dead letters," pieces of undeliverable mail that cannot be returned to their senders, either. Somebody has to do something about them, especially when they contain valuables or, as is the case here, point to the possibility that something illegal is happening.

The initial premise here, then, is a doozy, as we witness a man, with his wrists shackled together and his ankles tied up, crawling desperately from a house in the middle of nowhere to a nearby postal box. He has a message to send to anyone who will read it: He has been abducted and is being held against his will. The man does get a bloody scrap of paper into the mailbox before his captor overtakes him.

Just from this opening shot, there are several mysteries in need of solving, and DeBoer and McConaughy's screenplay possesses a fantastic hook for that investigation. The detective work begins at a post office in rural Illinois, where a pair of employees who handle dead letters find the note among other undeliverable mail that needs to be inspected and processed. Anything that goes beyond a misprinted street name or an incorrect number is moved up the chain to a man who's an expert in deduction and real-world puzzle. His name is Jasper (Tomas Boykin), and he is easily one of the most promising detectives to appear in a mystery movie in recent memory.

The shame of the movie, then, is that he is not the main character of this story, while the investigation itself undergoes such a long pause that the initial intrigue and suspense of this tale are sacrificed for a stranger but still fairly commonplace thriller. The filmmakers are really on to something at the start, and it's baffling how unaware of that they seem to be.

We'll stick with Jasper for a moment, even though his part in the plot is more of a prologue for the story DeBoer and McConaghy—about a pair of lonely, nerdy people who find connection, with one of them unaware that the other is not the kind of person with whom one wants to make or especially break a connection—eventually tell. Jasper is a specialist in investigatory work, which we witness as he tries to find the sender or receiver of a unique necklace that has been lost among the post office's dead letters.

The story, by the way, is set in the 1980s, so every piece of modern technology that would make such work as simple as some online searches is absent here. Jasper has to parse the letter that came with the necklace, hunt for clues about sender and receiver's locations and anything that might help to identify those individuals, and scour through encyclopedias and an atlas to piece together all of those little hints scattered throughout the letter.

At one point, the letter mentions that it rained recently wherever the writer was at the time, so with two possible locales available to him, a call to the National Weather Service lets him connect precipitation levels to the most likely location. He also has a contact in Norway, an enigmatic optometrist named Renée (Nick Heyman) who has access to the kind of personal records that a lowly postal employee in the middle of the Midwest wouldn't have, and the way the filmmakers establish this little, insulated world of practical investigative technique is utterly engaging.

It's nifty, unique stuff, but alas, it doesn't last long. No, the narrative tries to be trickier than that, bringing us back in time to see how Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.) ends up a prisoner in that isolated house, to witness the workings of the mind of Trent (John Fleck), and to understand how synthesizers, patches to make convincing organ and woodwind sounds, and a perceived act of betrayal leads the latter to hold the former captive. That story is weird, to be sure, in its equally niche concerns (There's plenty of talk about circuitry and aural fidelity and the politics of synthesizer manufacturing during the period), its gradual and vague dissection of Trent's psychology, and Fleck's admirably eccentric but still-grounded performance.

The whole thing is a bit of miscalculation, however. First, there is the fact that Jasper and his world are far more interesting than any of this, but more to the point, the structure of the script gives away the game of Trent and Josh's relationship/conflict before the movie itself even introduces their partnership in the narrative. Once the two meet in the extended flashback that fills the lengthy second act, we're just waiting for the moment when things go wrong. Once they do, we're again just waiting for the first act to play out yet again from a different perspective.

Even so, there's still plenty to appreciate about Dead Mail, especially its grainy, dirty look. DeBoer and McConaghy do also manage to surprise us on occasion, even though the whole story is barely fleshing out details that are made obvious from the start. It is a nimble little thriller at its core, with an underlying atmosphere of loneliness that keeps it uneasy, but once the filmmakers dismiss the most persuasive part of their story, the movie becomes an uphill battle to try to be anywhere near as effective.

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