The Dead Thing (2024)
Directed by Elric Kane
Screenplay by Kane & Webb Wilcoxen
Starring Blu Hunt & Ben Smith-Petersen.

Horror

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
Proceed at your own caution.

Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing follows Alex (Blu Hunt) as she goes on meaningless date after meaningless date, hooking up with guys through a dating app but never finding any actual real, lasting connection. Until she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). The two of them have a lovely, passionate night together. Then Kyle disappears into thin air. Alex begins to look for Kyle, and soon finds out he’s hiding, or perhaps entirely unaware of, a terrible, otherworldly secret.

The Dead Thing is a contemporary Gothic tale about the dating app scene’s perils and so much more. Kane uses the Gothic to exaggerate ideas about how we never really know who it is we’re connecting with and what might be lurking in their past. The film isn’t cynical about online dating/dating apps, it’s realistic, and uses the figure of the ghost to help explore how the search for love can, sometimes, be fraught with terrors. Kane actually seems to touch on the fragility of all sorts of relationships, whether on- or offline. While The Dead Thing is not a direct adaptation of anything—despite the fact the film is billed as a “neo–realist take on an Invisible Man story“—it feels pulled right out of a book from another time and transposed into our current day, as we see how love and male obsession has changed little since the days of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, it’s only gotten more intrusive and deadly thanks to the ghastly reach of technology.The Dead Thing’s contemporary Gothic elements begin with the way Kane portrays how Alex kind of lives like a ghost. We see her going on dates, having sex, then ‘ghosting’ matches on a dating app. In a couple scenes, Alex avoids her roommate while they’re in the house at the same time, like a ghost moving between rooms quietly. In several scenes, Alex uses what looks like a light therapy lamp in her bedroom, as if a pale ghost tanning so that she can seamlessly slip into the daytime amongst the living people. Then, finally, Alex winds up literally ghosted when Kyle disappears a little while after their initial date/hookup, and she discovers he’s an actual ghost. A co-worker notices Alex has been down and remarks she seems like she’s “in mourning.” When she lies in bed and remembers her time with Kyle, we see hands touching her all over, ghostly memories of his touch lingering on her skin. This is where the ghost motif is most important: dark obsession. Kyle becomes entirely fixated on Alex in a terrible way, especially after he discovers his own deadness. His ghostly presence is always felt. In one scene, Kyle’s on top of Alex, but then disappears, yet she still feels him on/in her. He’s always with her, despite the fact that she can’t even see him at times. In another scene, Kyle and Alex are having sex, but instead of looking romantic it actually looks more like Alex is having a deeply physical nightmare, and she has to roll right out of bed to escape his clutches while he rattles on about how they could “be unending.”

Tragedy strikes Alex after it’s clear Kyle will not let her go. He tells her chillingly: “There‘s no one else. There‘s nothing. Just you and me.” She tries asking him to leave her life, but he eventually returns to shatter her hopes of a proper romance with someone else. Kane features a scene of Alex sunbathing and hiking with new co-worker Chris (John Karna), a hopeful new love interest. It’s a stark difference to the earlier, darker scenes featuring Alex cloistered away in her apartment using the light therapy lamp. This bit with Alex and her new guy feels like a shift away from online dating back into organically meeting people, moving Alex away from the hidden monsters of the dating app world. Sadly, it doesn’t last, and the terrifying Gothic romance Alex experienced earlier with Kyle becomes true Gothic horror.

At the end of The Dead Thing, Alex finds herself in new, ghostly territory, but not like when she first met Kyle, and she’s actually right back where she started, going on yet another date. She’s destined to keep on returning to the dating app. In the final shot, she sees a terrifying reflection of her true, dead face in her phone’s screen—a perfect image of how technology can haunt us. But Kane’s film is slightly more concerned with the scary things that can, and do, happen in women’s lives when contemporary life is so alienating that many of us have no other way to meet somebody than to download an app. A subplot in the film concerns Alex’s friend and roommate dealing with an engagement that falls apart, and revelations surrounding it become a larger part of Alex’s story, too. This other view on the search for (offline) love is why The Dead Thing is, above all, about how a desperate desire for love and connection can potentially kill us instead of giving us life.