Some say that electric lighting killed the ghost story. It’s easy enough to believe that restless souls haunt rooms lit by flickering candlelight or that incorporeal beings inhabit the corners of rooms just beyond the light of a comforting fire. But the bright and even illumination of modern lighting leaves little room for such flights of imagination—when you can see everything clearly, there’s little chance left to catch a glimpse of something that might or might not be there.
Elric Kane would beg to disagree. When we first meet Alex (Blu Hunt), the central character in The Dead Thing, her face is illuminated by the glow of her cell phone with darkness all around. The effect is as spooky as anything imagined by M.R. James, and it’s the first of many expressive uses of light in this film—including the overly-bright florescent lighting of her office, the dark streets outside, and the many times the primary light in a scene appears to come from a cell phone. Quite often we see Alex swiping through photos of men on a dating app (“Friktion”), a process that results in numerous meetups in trendy restaurants and, more often than not, sexual encounters. There’s also the light therapy (or is it tanning?) she regularly practices, which requires dark glasses to shield her eyes but a maximum of skin exposure otherwise.
While Alex seems to be living an Instagram-ready life, her lived experience doesn’t match up to that shiny surface: her job is boring, her boss is a bit of a creeper, she’s squatting with her friend Kara (Katherine Hughes), whose own life is a mess, and the many encounters she has with attractive young men don’t mean much to her. Then she hooks up with Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen, a stuntman whose understated acting style is exactly what the role demands) and they click immediately.
It’s almost uncanny, dare I say, how well the two of them intuitively understand each other’s rhythms and needs. Then Kyle disappears from her life, until she sees him with another woman. Or does she? She sets up another date with him and he shows up but doesn’t recognize her. Exactly what is going on here? It’s the kind of ambiguity upon which the classic ghost story relies, and Kane creates a reasonable modern equivalent in this film.
There are two stars in The Dead Thing: Hunt (who made her film debut as Danielle Moonstar/Mirage in The New Mutants) and the cinematography of Ioana Vasile, which totally sells the possibility that the supernatural can exist within our modern world. Vasile also captures the film’s many sex scenes in a way that is both erotic and tasteful (this is a very sex positive film, and I doubt that having the Shudder premiere on Valentine’s Day is a coincidence).
Kane’s screenplay, which he co-wrote with Webb Wilcoxon), embeds criticism of the modern dating scene within an effectively creepy story and populates his world with a convincing lot of bright young things for whom using smartphones is second nature (if you’re not one of them, watching this film may make you feel very old indeed). Not everything works, but overall The Dead Thing succeeds because it understands one key point: ghost stories work best when they suggest there are things in the world that can’t be understood by our rational minds, and that premise applies as well to modern Los Angeles as to Victorian England. | Sarah Boslaugh
The Dead Thing is available for streaming on Shudder beginning Feb. 14.
