It’s often refreshing to see horror filmmakers prioritize characters over themes, especially in modestly budgeted horror movies. “The Dead Thing” has that going for it as well as some other qualities, including a strong lead performance from Blu Hunt (“The New Mutants,” “The Originals”). She plays Alex, a young, alienated office drone who spends most of her free time hooking up with guys through a Tinder-like phone app.
Alex’s story has a familiar trajectory, though its details are often so unusual as to keep things interesting. After a few one-night stands, Alex falls for a mysterious suitor, who may or may not be dead. Who exactly is Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), and what does he mean to Alex? The answers provided are clear, making “The Dead Thing” a letdown given its general focus on what Alex experiences rather than what Alex suggests.
For the most part, Alex’s stifling routine speaks for her and her feelings. She eats supermarket sushi (California rolls) with the same emotionless proficiency that she puts up with her clingy work colleague Mark (Joey Millin). She wears wireless earbuds, rides in cabs, noshes on Twizzlers, and suns herself with a makeshift tanning lamp in her bedroom. Alex also has sex with a lot of men whom she sees once and then never again. The days blend together, and eventually, she blurts out something that has likely been in her head for a while now: “Do you ever feel like there’s no escape?” And: “Can you imagine dying in a place like this?” Step aside, Barbie!
Places like this are fairly common and presented with hyper-real attention to mood lighting, whether the bar’s warm dark tones or the harsh halogen whites of Alex’s office. There’s nothing to see here, so it’s no wonder the filmmakers prioritize people over places and plot mechanics. She’s the focus throughout, but she eventually stops being a person who struggles to cope with mundane pressures and starts acting like an overburdened clothesline for some underwhelming ideas about modern life.
To be fair, Alex’s story is pretty consistent in its obviousness, from how Alex obsessively snacks on her Twizzlers to how she crashes out of her day job later on. She’s a woman on the edge, and not much has changed in genre cinema since G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box.” What’s especially disappointing about “The Dead Thing” is its creators’ inexpert and unconvincing toggling between hacky movie logic and chemistry-fueled interpersonal encounters. You have to believe that Alex’s real problem is that she’s routinely confronted with a realistic world that’s either hostile and unaccommodating or superficially inviting. You have to think that these are her options since she inevitably has to reckon with how her decisions and actions have steered her down this rather grim spiral of behavior.
Unfortunately, Hunt can only do so much with co-stars who either don’t or aren’t meant to have chemistry with her character. Kyle’s an open question mark, and Smith-Petersen fills that narrow role nicely. Millin also does what he can with an equally limited role, swaying and leering with an uneasy but credible sort of volatility. The least convincing performance comes from John Karna, who plays Chris, a sketchy co-worker at Alex’s soul-draining job. Chris appears to be as pushy as Mark, but he’s also ostensibly nurturing and sensitive, which matters to Alex. Sparks don’t fly, though, making Chris’s central role in the ensuing psychodrama somewhat unbelievable. It’s one thing to slam into a foregone conclusion and another to struggle to get there.
Some moments of intimacy can also be found throughout, particularly in the lived-in details that define Alex’s relationship with her estranged roommate, Cara (Katherine Hughes). Their clipped but meaningful exchanges do more to humanize Alex than almost everything else in the movie, possibly because their relationship isn’t defined by what they do for each other.
Cara and Alex leave many things unsaid, which adds extra significance to their turbulent relationship and mutual anxieties. Who will love them at the end of the day? That’s something of a loaded question, one that the makers of “The Dead Thing” leave open-ended.
Judgmental and ungenerous, Alex’s story gives you enough answers to either tsk-tsk or nod sadly in response. The rest’s up to you, the viewer, which feels like a bit of a cop-out. It’s not, since this kind of movie never really needed to be intellectually deep or even immediately sensible from moment to moment. It still might have been nice if “The Dead Thing” didn’t collapse as soon as Chris entered the picture. He’s the wrong kind of mystery, an obvious dud who mainly keeps things moving forward. I get it, but I don’t really see it.
