Dead Mail (Frightfest 2024)(Review)

From American writer-director duo Kyle McConaghy and Joe DeBoer comes this strange, 1980s-set low budget indie film that manages to defy easy categorisation, standing alone as a revival of dirty ’70s exploitation dramas (think John Flynn or Sam Peckinpah), and ’80s analogue nostalgia. Dead Mail jumps right into the action, the opening seconds featuring a man bound by chains desperately crawling out of a bungalow. He scrambles for a post-box and drops in a bloodstained note moments before he’s dragged back in by a figure. This unaddressed note makes its way to the local post office where Jasper, who specialises in “dead mail”, works his investigative magic to figure out where it’s come from and who the captive is, and this is only the start of an odd, fractured plot that navigates an empty, eerie vision of midwestern American. The casting is excellent, and not a single side character is neglected in creating a memorable face, while the expertly selected leads quickly establish a sense of affection that raises the stakes of the gritty crime plot.

With its array of quirky supporting characters and the farcical, inept crime conspiracy at its core, the story has elements of the Coen brothers, but at its most energetic moments (such as that gripping cold open), the camera work has the handheld exuberance and dirty texture of Evil Dead era Sam Raimi. I say all this because, like I said earlier, this is a surprisingly unquantifiable work – its opening scene screaming horror, but it’s quite a sedate affair from that point onwards. McConaghy and DeBoer’s later attempts at constructing thrills fall a little flat, and at the film’s weakest points it feels quite aimless – the 105 minute runtime feeling dragged when, on the face of it, this feels like it should be a 90 minute rip through and through.

Where the efforts in genre filmmaking feel undercooked, the stylistic evocation of time and place is Dead Mail’s greatest achievement. The underlying atmosphere is far from warm, but it’s a strangely addictive world to inhabit, and creating create such a rich sense of location and space on this sort of low budget is an excellent feat. This iteration of ’80s Americana is a sparse, insipid place, painted with every shade of brown you could possibly imagine. Production designer Payton Jane does a magnificent job of creating the look of this world in a way that’s both fully convincing, but also bafflingly odd. Look no further than the film’s incredible roster of wallpapers, each more offensive and strangely compelling than the last – the bathroom where our captive is held even having wallpaper on the ceiling!

This extends to the cinematography and editing, the vague mix of handheld and stationary shots paired with an inconsistent rhythm of cutting helping to sell this as a film that looks like it’s not just set in the ’80s, but from the ’80s. Top that off with possibly the most convincing fake 16mm filter aesthetics I’ve ever seen (I didn’t for a second consider that this was actually a digital film), and the best compliment I could give is that if I was channel surfing late one evening and flicked on to this blind, then I probably wouldn’t even question that this was a forgotten 40-year old B-movie, and I think that might be what McConaghy and DeBoer are going for.

At a time when ’80s nostalgia must have surely reached peak saturation, Dead Mail is surprisingly unique in where it chooses to stake its admiration for a bygone era as there are no neon lit clubs, cheesy needle drops or kids biking around the streets aimlessly. One of the key characters, Josh, is a synth keyboard technician, but he’s less interested in the poppy, square wave sound of his time, and more obsessed with recreating real life instruments seamlessly through the machines. The film takes great interest in this process, affectionately observing the geeky, methodical artistry of Josh and Trent’s work, and this unique ethos covers the score too. Featuring a fully synthesised soundtrack, forget Gorgio Moroder as this is a discordant, minimalist-style score that effectively holds together the uncomfortable, sparse sense of dread that runs through the whole film. An even less predictable point of Dead Mail’s nostalgia is its tribute to the U.S. Postal Service, depicted here as a grassroots community of people who are simply damn good at their job. For all of the bleak, subversive character drama on display, there’s a running thread of people who take an exorbitant sense of pride in what they do, in professions that are nearly all but lost to modern technology now.

Dead Mail will certainly be a tough sell for some, so if you feel like we’ve seen enough of filmmakers trying to play time-travellers by making something as convincingly antique as possible, then this certainly won’t sway you. Its purposefully meandering plot, right down to its anti-climax that, to me at least, feels period appropriate for how abruptly these old exploitation dramas would end, will irk others. For anyone in the mood for a perverse character study, there’s a sweet spot here, packaged by filmmakers who are clearly having a ball recreating this hazy analogue dreamscape.

Jake’s Archive – Dead Mail (2024)