“The Dead Thing” (2024) follows Alex (Blu Hunt), a LA woman bored with her monotonous job and coworker, Mark (John Millin), her assembly line of one night stands found on Friktion, a dating app, her Uber commute, her nightly beauty regimen of tanning in her bedroom, and Cara Madison (Katherine Hughes), her friend and roommate who is going through a crisis. When she matches with Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen, who is Riley Keough’s husband), she is immediately attracted to him, and her routine gets disrupted. Though they seem to be into each other, he ghosts her, so she tries to find him. When she finds him, he has no memory of her. What happened?
When you watch “The Dead Thing,” you may ask yourself what or who is the title referring to? Is it Alex, who seems unable to connect with anyone and is suffering from an existential crisis? Is it her job, which feels like a vast liminal space for two employees who work adjacent to each other even though there appears to be enough room to spread out? Is it the alleged friendship with Cara, whom Alex seems to be avoiding? Or is it the chronically online routine of interacting more with technology than the people, places and things in the tangible world? Is it life in synthetic spaces so Alex never goes to the beach for her tan or partake in any organic activities except sex? It feels like Alex has been dead or at least depressed for a long time because life feels insignificant.
It kind of makes sense that Alex responds to Kyle. His photo is the only one with a living being, a cat. He listens to her, cuts to the chase and does not immediately try to have sex with her when she takes him to her place. He reminds her of what she really loves, drawing, and how she is not pursuing her passions, but lives a place setter life. She works her job, but it is not what she wants to do. She lives with Cara, but it is only temporary. She does not just have one-night stands. She is failing to launch her life and going through the motions, and Kyle points it out.
After one night with Kyle, Alex comes to life, wants more and starts engaging with the people in her life. The problem with connecting is that it creates an opening for others to interact with and touch her. Her numbing routine is permanently disrupted without the benefit of having Kyle in her life. So she investigates and gets answers. Hint: there is a supernatural element. As cowriters Elric Kane and Webb Wilcoxen reveal more, it works until it does not, and eventually the story runs out of steam, but it is a good attempt to remix a classic horror trope.
Parasocial relationships are no substitute for actual ones, but when people meet using the same online platforms that facilitate their fantasies about famous strangers, real life becomes parasitic and makes it more difficult to have any kind of authentic relationship and experience. Using supernatural folklore as a metaphor for this phenomenon is a great idea. It has the potential to raise a hitherto fore two-dimensional supernatural figure into the romantic status of vampires regardless of the obvious repulsive downsides if “Nosferatu” (2024) is any indication. It is ultimately a tragedy until the writers start to have their characters engage in the usual scares. Once the twist is revealed, it slides into the usual homicidal antics which can be explained but feels like a motivational stretch.
Kane, who also directs, does a great job of emphasizing the deadness of this world with a monotone color palette. The greens are not vibrant but resemble embalming fluid. Reds and pinks emerge when Alex gets more sucked into her obsession with Kyle. One great scene is when she wears a white shirt with vegetation on it when she is with Chris, but as she returns home, she inserts earbuds and listens to the song that she associates with Kyle. A patch of rectangular red light falls over her eyes.
It also does not help that when Alex finally gets a feasible human connection, Chris (John Karna), a true sushi lover, it rushes too quickly into treating him like a potential love interest instead of a gateway to the corporeal world. It could be the point. Relationships, healthy or not, are a distraction and escape from mortality and the fear of life as a futile creeping towards death. Sex becomes la petit mort, the little death, in a literal sense for Alex. Orgasm becomes a release from routine but also kills her slim tie to life and jeopardizes every practical aspect that makes her a functioning member of society.
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Kyle is haunting the app then when Alex finds out that he is dead, she tries to continue their romantic relationship. Once Kyle realizes that he is dead, he lashes out at anyone who reminds him or could take Alex from him because she is his only tether to the world. Too bad for Kyle that he attached himself to a woman with attachment issues. [I only saw the first episode of “Insecure” and kept imagining Issa Rae rapping “haunted pussy.”] She correctly refuses to seal the deal, but it does not matter because Kyle turns into an abusive, isolating boyfriend, and if he cannot have her, no one will. He kills everyone around her and strangles her. Her worst nightmare comes true. She haunts the app and is forced to spend eternity in hipster bars meeting boring men.
My main problem with “The Dead Thing” is that turning Kyle into a homicidal maniac feels too easy, and once the film started showing his perspective, it feels like a sudden character shift. It would have been more interesting to at least build up to it because most people do not jump to killing, there is a development. Kyle was a person that most women felt safe around. He could be an example of the proverbial nice guy who does enough to enter someone’s life but then becomes more sinister the longer that he stays, but Kyle was a real person, and the story needed to establish in some small way that he was like that before he died. Maybe just becoming a ghost and knowing it is supposed to be sufficient, but it felt like a way to ramp up the horror than an organic development in the narrative. One solution was to not make Kyle feel like a real person and just relegate him to a monster. The writers seem to be showing how Alex feels about most men—that they are suffocating monsters, which explains the reason that Chris becomes a revenant and is worse in death than in life.
It would have been better to stick to just showing Alex’s perspective then it would be a just desserts film. It was a nice touch and revelation that Alex is a horrible person, slept with Paul (Brennan Mejia), Cara’s fiancée, and is the reason that Cara split up with him. Alex is a frenemy and op to Cara. She is clearly jealous that Cara has a wealthy, involved parent who can buy an apartment for their daughter, who was going to get married. Who knows how long she has been sabotaging Cara’s life? When Kyle starts terrorizing Cara, it feels random and not a part of his modus operandi. It was also aggravating that bodies kept piling up around Alex, but the other shoe never drops.
