THE DEAD THING - Mark Reviews Movies

The Dead Thing, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2025

At first, The Dead Thing is a look at the numbing state of modern living—especially the contemporary dating scene. Alex (Blu Hunt), our main character, is an average young woman, living however she can in Los Angeles. She has a thankless, meaningless job of scanning things for some corporate entity and for some unknowable reason. She lives with her best friend in a house that the friend's mother bought for her. As for Alex's love life, it amounts to a string of dates and sexual encounters with assorted and quickly forgotten men, whom she finds by way of an app on her phone.

Co-writer/director Elric Kane makes this study intriguing by way of dramatizing it as a series of patterns. We feel the grind, the absence of fulfillment, and the continual disappointment of this character's existence, simply by way of the movie's rhythm and visual repetition (Alex sitting in the same bar, saying and hearing the same things to and from man after man who are only distinct in the appearance). There is, though, no set pattern in the screenplay by Kane and Webb Wilcoxen, which keeps evolving and surprising.

As strange as it may seem from a description of the early section of the film, the end goal here is a horror tale. Through all of that stories developments and revelations, though, Kane and Wilcoxen never lose sight of the material's themes about modernity. It just becomes more sinister and more allegorical, as the real horror here remains on an existential level.

That path, ironically, begins with some optimism. After that string of dates and one-night affairs, Alex finds Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen) on the dating app. He's a good-looking guy who appears as nice as anyone can from a single photo. He is holding a cat, after all. She messages him. Kyle responds, and the two arrange to meet at, of course, Alex's bar of choice.

This date's different from the rest, however. Kyle is upfront about some things, such as admitting that the cat from the picture isn't actually his, and Alex feels comfortable and safe enough with the guy to explain her job and living situations—as well as how grating and deadening the routine, the disappointments, and the inability to see any future for herself are. They share something in the conversation and the silences, so when Kyle says they don't really need to talk anymore, Alex is more than happy to bring him back to her place—well, the room she has in the house belonging to her friend Cara (Katherine Hughes).

They have sex, of course, but the night doesn't end there. Alex and Kyle keep talking, start drawing each other (She's an aspiring artist who seems to have let that dream fall aside), and note that there is something very different about the connection they have. By morning, Alex has to force herself to go to work, but they both say they'd like see each other again.

Time passes. Alex doesn't hear from or get any responses to messages from Kyle. Her usual pattern seems to start up again, and that's when Alex spots Kyle at the bar—on a date with another woman.

At this point, it's difficult to determine what to reveal and what should remain unspoken about the rest of the story's developments. It seems to become a thriller of sorts, seen through the eyes of an unanticipated stalker, as Alex tries to track down Kyle at his job at a coffee shop and other means. When Kyle does come back into the picture, matters become even more complicated and mysterious. The guy either pretends not to recognize Alex or he genuinely has forgotten her and the long night they shared together.

One could almost say that the two characters become haunted by that night—Alex because she thought it was the beginning of something special and Kyle because he knows he should remember an event like that. The film is the story of a haunting in a more literal sense, but thankfully, we can avoid any more direct description of what that means. The filmmakers have a lot of ideas, plenty of oppressive atmosphere, and a couple of very good performances to discuss outside of matters of plot.

At its core, this does become a story of obsession. Alex becomes obsessed with Kyle and desperate to find out what happened to him. Meanwhile, Kyle finds himself compelled to keep repeating his dating strategy with the app, until he becomes latched to Alex in an almost co-dependent way. The film feels unsettling before we know what's actually happening within this tale, because Kane presents this all as an elusive, waking nightmare of everyday dissatisfaction, temporal confusion, and otherworldly fixation. Even when supernatural elements come into play, they're grounded in something eerily real, particularly as the central relationship becomes one in which that obsession rises to the surface.

It's a smart film about those notions, despite and because of the filmmakers' willingness to take them to the extremes demanded by what's eventually revealed. Hunt and Smith-Petersen help to level out those plot-based excesses, too, giving mournful performances that reflect how seriously Kane takes his premise and what it has to say about modern life.

Mostly, though, The Dead Thing is a compelling experience, simply in watching how the filmmakers pull from so many seemingly disparate ideas and elements, only to meld them into a cohesive whole. It's a haunting film, in terms of both what's on the surface and the sense of melancholy it so effectively creates.

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