THE DEAD THING movie poster | ©2025 Shudder

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes, Joey Millin, Brennan Mejia, Aerial Washington
Writers: Webb Wilcoxen and Elric Kane
Director: Elric Kane
Distributor: Shudder
Release Date: February 14, 2025

With a title like THE DEAD THING, we’re primed for one to show up eventually. In fact, we may be primed for something a lot scarier than what we get here. This DEAD THING turns out to be a lot more tense when it mimics reality than when it reaches into the supernatural.

We are in Los Angeles, both downtown and in an adjoining pleasantly hipster neighborhood. Alex (Blu Hunt) lives here with her best friend Cara (Katherine Hughes).

Alex has a job at a twenty-four-hour printing facility located in a gleaming office building. She spends much of her time checking her matches on Friktion, the dating app on her phone. Alex isn’t looking for romance as much as she’s seeking recreation and a break from the tedium of her existence.

But then Friktion introduces her to Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). So far as Alex (and we) can tell, they hit it off both socially and erotically. Here is someone Alex wouldn’t mind seeing again. But he ghosts her.

Alex becomes preoccupied with Kyle, going so far as to stalk him. She makes a surprising discovery.

Director Elric Kane and his co-writer Webb Wilcoxen want to establish a tone and a mood, but the build-up takes what feels like a very long time. This is partly because they are being deliberate, but also because, for all the scenes that we spend with Alex, we don’t get to know her very well.

Alex doesn’t seem to know what she wants out of life, and that’s fair enough, but she also doesn’t have much curiosity. Yes, she wants to know what’s up with Kyle, but beyond that, she doesn’t try to figure out what’s going on, even once things start getting weird. This may be true to life for a certain type of person, but it’s not especially engaging to watch.

Part of the point the filmmakers want to underscore is the profound sexual charge between Alex and Kyle. We get that it motivates them, but if one isn’t moved or stimulated by the softcore activity we see here, we find ourselves waiting through a fair amount of it for something else to happen.

As for the fear factor, characters react in ways that suggest they’re immediately jumping to conclusions. We know these deductions are correct, but they seem to bypass more normal explanations.

Hunt is very expressive, helping us see Alex as someone eager to open up, even as she is afraid to do so. Smith-Petersen has an easy naturalism as Kyle. John Karna is charming as Alex’s caring co-worker.

THE DEAD THING makes the most of its attractive locations, which provide superb ambience. Otherwise, THE DEAD THING is reminiscent of a hard-R version of those mythology-averse horror movies of the week that used to be made for broadcast television in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

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