The Dead Thing review: A unique merger of online dating and the supernatural

In Elric Kane’s erotic ghost(ing) story, an alienated young woman finds her kindred spirit in a promiscuous lost soul.

The Dead Thing had its world première at Fantasia 2024, 26 July

The Dead Thing opens with its protagonist Alex (Blu Hunt) literally in a dark place. As she scrolls and swipes through the dating app Friktion, the only source of light is her smartphone’s screen illuminating her face while leaving her otherwise isolated in a shadowy limbo. Her search for that night’s date is intercut with its aftermath, and as her selected partner goes down on her and Alex lies supine with her head tilted back to face the screen in an inverted moment of la petite mort, or the ‘little death’ of orgasmic surrender, the title appears, instantly forging an association between its words and Alex herself.

Alex may be in pursuit of constant, no-strings sexual pleasure, but perhaps that is because she needs to keep reminding herself that she is alive, caught up as she is in a numbing cycle of work and play, and insulated from the world around her by the headphones permanently placed in her ears. Alex ignores the (written) request of her oldest friend and housemate Cara (Katherine Hughes) to wake her up any time to talk, pretends to be asleep when Cara comes to her room, and ghosts any past hook-up who has the temerity to wish to see her again – and even though The Dead Thing is totally focused on Alex, she is so disconnected from others that it will be over eight minutes before we even hear her speak to anyone else. Those first words of hers – “Do you ever feel like there’s no escape? Just day after day after day” – encapsulate her sense of entrapment in a zombie-like routine.

Alex addresses these words to Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), a date to whom, unusually, she feels comfortable enough to open up in a manner that is not purely physical. “We don’t really need to talk, do we?” says Kyle, and though this is a cheesy come-on that Alex will later learn he uses on the many girls he meets in bars, his professed ease with silence, and even his promiscuity, mark him out as an oddly perfect match for her. Over one long night, sparks fly between these lovers – but then Alex finds herself ghosted by the man she really thought was her kindred spirit and (lost) soulmate. Obsessed, she watches Kyle picking up other women and stalks his old haunts, until she realises that the reason he, not unlike her, keeps hopping beds every night to convince himself that he is alive may be because he is in fact dead – a fading, if fuckable, revenant not entirely of this world, like a past fling whose messages you can choose to ignore, but whose contact you cannot quite bring yourself to delete.

Now made aware by Alex of the undead status to which he has previously been oblivious, Kyle feels a special attachment to her, and for the first time in his life does not want to leave. The sex is great, but Alex wonders what future there can be in this possessive phantom romance, even as she starts to develop feelings for her new, full-of-life workmate Chris (John Karna). Yet Kyle does not want to let go of either Alex, or his tentative grip on our world, and as his desperation increases, his behaviour becomes ever more toxic, controlling and abusive.

Perhaps the closest analogues to The Dead Thing are Ben and Chris Blaine’s eroticised ghost story Nina Forever (2015) and Hong Seong-eun’s ever-so-slightly supernatural tale of social alienation Aloners (2021) – but Elric Kane’s feature, which he co-wrote with Webb Wilcox, is unique in the way it merges online dating and paranormal activity to allegorise the twin needs for connection and distance that characterise our compartmentalised urban lives in the digital age. Here all of Los Angeles is shot to look like a crepuscular underworld, where it is hard to tell the living from the dead.

The Dead Thing captures people sleepwalking through the drudgery of their existence and becoming uncoupled from themselves and each other. There is an aching sadness to all this, but as the characters’ fear of absolute solitude turns to a sort of clinging psychopathy, there is considerable tension too. In the end, as Alex is left to reflect upon the personal, if invisible, damage that she has incurred on her quest for momentary, masturbatory intimacy with others through endless little deaths, she is once more, as at the beginning, in a dark place, day after day after day with no escape.