I never thought I’d say this, but watching Dead Mail made me want to spend more time at the post office.
This low-budget horror picture debuting on Shudder on April 18, written and directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, is a weirdly compelling portrait of civil servants, especially the hard-working sleuths at the dead mail office who figure out what to do with packages and envelopes sent to incorrect or illegible addresses. Unfortunately only the first and third acts of the picture exploit this oddly compelling setting. During the bulk of the storyline, despite some good performances, you may find yourself pulling a variant on Milhouse Van Houton’s line, asking “when are they gonna’ get back to the post office?!?”
The beginning of Dead Mail luxuriates in watching Jasper (Tomas Boykin), the Sherlock Holmes of mislabeled missives, figure out where lost objects are supposed to go. The movie is set some time in the 1980s, so cell phones and Google are out of the question, but our mysterious detective has an ace up his sleeve—a pal he can call with access to an early form of the internet. (His monitor has green blocky letters, for some added Matrix vibes.)
One day a crumpled piece of paper with blood stains, an address and a cry for help shows up on his desk. Just another hoax, right? Well, maybe not. He takes it home for further inspection, though he lives in a men’s shelter, suggesting there is more to his story than we might think. But before we find out what that is, well, the narrative takes a bit of a Psycho turn.
The action moves to that of the kidnapped man who slipped that scrawled paper in a mailbox. (We saw it in a prologue, so we know it’s legit.) The frightened man is Josh (Sterling Macer, Jr.) and, indeed, he’s being held captive, Misery-style, by Trent (John Fleck). But he’s not being forced to write a novel. Instead, he’s tasked with creating a synthesizer that can better mimic the sound of woodwind instruments.
Yeah, you read that right. Dead Mail is nothing if not specific in its unusual details.
As the story moves back in time we see that Trent is a gadget enthusiast who meets up with Josh at some kind of synthesizer expo. Josh is showing off his latest creation, which is remarkable for a homebrew device, but is too focused on one sound (a church organ) and can’t compete against the Japanese imports with a catalogue of sounds.
Trent, however, is spellbound—and offers to stake his work, offering Josh the time and resources to further develop his vision. At first, it seems like a really nice partnership between two socially awkward nerds. The men talk a lot about epoxy. But things soon grow strange—Trent is obsessing over Josh and his work. We put together that Trent has real separation issues, as he’s never gotten over an incident in college when he was on the track and field team, and perceived a betrayal by a teammate.
Here’s where Dead Mail wins points for leaving some ellipses in the narrative. Is Trent an extremely closeted, self-loathing gay man? Maybe! Is Trent also “weird about race?” Again, maybe. Both his old college chum and Josh are Black men. So is Jasper, for that matter, but that is just a coincidence. Probably. Or maybe not?
As all of this churns along, the film deploys an eerie early synthesizer score—a mix of original work as well as J.S. Bach, Henry Purcell and the old warhorse, “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy. As we circle back to where the movie begins, the style evokes several oddball deep cuts from the era, like Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine (1977), Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye (1987) and Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts (1989). There is something about the use of DV grain that reminded me a little of last year’s I Saw the TV Glow, too.
So the movie is clearly a winner in the vibes department. Less interesting, however, is the actual story, which is unusually straightforward. It isn’t bad, exactly, but one may be left asking “yeah, and?” at the end. To keep with a musical metaphor, there are a lot of synthesized grace notes, but not much of a melodic line. Dead Mail does not deserve a “return to sender,” but this is not a first class shipment.
