The Dead Thing Review

Arriving on Shudder just in time for Valentine’s Day, The Dead Thing is a new horror movie about the hell of online dating. As such, it has to compete with the decade-and-a-half of stand-up comedy, articles, books, podcasts, TV shows, friends, oversharers, and, well, other horror movies that have expressed the same feeling about Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, et al.: “The Apps,” as we collectively refer to them, are kind of lousy. With a topic that exhausted, The Dead Thing really doesn’t stand a chance of saying anything new, interesting, or even scary. And it doesn’t help its chances with half-baked characters, moody gestures at style that are quickly abandoned, and moments of psychological horror that frankly, don’t seem very thoughtful.

Alex (Blu Hunt) is trapped in a familiar pattern of boring, repetitive first dates, shallow conversations, and passable sex. She has a pretty soul-sucking job that involves… scanning things? Overnight? The specifics are not very clear, but the isolation is: She only ever has one coworker present in an otherwise empty office, which she enters and leaves at hours where most people seem to be at home. She avoids her roommate, and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of hobbies, choosing to decompress in front of a UV lamp with some music. Then she does it all over again: Swipe the app, go on a date, maybe a hookup, go to work.

If The Dead Thing has anything particular to say about modern dating and the app-fueled meet market, it’s bemoaning the shallowness that afflicts Alex. Elric Kane and Webb Wicoxen’s script underlines how the skin-deep interactions that come with meeting people via a smartphone can cause our emotional muscles to atrophy. We’re left not just yearning for a deeper connection but unable to sustain one once the opportunity knocks. It’s just so much easier to check out, or to settle for the initial thrill of a casual hookup over and over again until it loses all meaning. That’s why things feel different when Alex hits it off with Kyle (Ben Smith Petersen) on an app called Friktion. Finally, the two find something more than the superficial chit-chat that’s turned them numb. Finally, they flash smiles that seem genuine. Finally, the sex is more than just fine. But Kyle has terrible secrets – because of course he has terrible secrets.

This is not the most original idea – in fact, it’s not even one that’s unique to online dating. Originality isn’t everything, though – especially in horror, where execution rules supreme. Unfortunately, The Dead Thing’s early hints of style – dreamy lights and beguiling strings that open the movie – quickly fade away for washed out, harsh-looking scenes that feel more amateurish than intentional. The same applies to the scares, when the movie finally turns towards horror – the ambition of first-time director Elric Kane seems to exceed his movie’s grasp. Moments that seem like they’re meant to disorient mostly just feel muddled, and scenes where characters question their grip on reality end up feeling kind of confused instead – potentially confusing the viewer on accident, instead of on purpose.

It’s also extremely disappointing how light on menace or dread The Dead Thing is, given its fraught subject matter. Horror movies have long made a meal out of dating’s potential for fright. Making a choice to be vulnerable with someone, to meet another person alone, to see where the night goes – it’s high-risk, high-reward stuff! However, the effectiveness of this kind of horror story comes from specificity – the ways in which an individual person might be vulnerable, their distinct worries, concerns, or hopes, and how another person may fulfill or threaten them.

The two leads of The Dead Thing aren’t developed enough for that. They live in rooms that are too spare to clue us into what they might enjoy, they have conversations about how much they don’t like conversations (“We don’t need to talk, do we?” is one character’s go-to line), they have virtually no friends to speak of. Alex and Kyle feel less like people and more like an excuse to just wallow in the misery of what it means to look for connection now, and fret about how we may have encouraged ourselves as a society to take a turn for the worse.

In the broadest possible sense, The Dead Thing is on to something in the way that you might be on to something if you decided to wear a coat during a blizzard. While there are certainly more specialty and niche dating apps designed to ease the pain, the fact remains: It’s bad out there! Unfortunately, The Dead Thing doesn’t make a case for anything more thoughtful than swiping over to the next movie on the queue.