If you’ve ever stared at your dating apps and thought, “This experience would be better if it were 94 minutes long and also dead inside,” The Dead Thing is here to prove you wrong.
Elric Kane’s feature debut has a great logline: a lonely woman falls for a mysterious barista on a blind date, he disappears, and she becomes obsessed with finding out why. It’s a horror drama about modern dating, toxic relationships, and the ghosts of bad decisions. Unfortunately, the film itself feels less like a haunting and more like getting stuck on an awkward first date you can’t leave because you’ve already ordered food.
Swipe Right on Misery
Our protagonist, Alex (Blu Hunt), is an emotionally exhausted lab-office drone who spends her nights doom-swiping through dating apps and her days wondering why everything feels like a loop. She finally meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), a sensitive barista with a cat in his profile and Serious Feelings in his eyes. They talk all night, have sex, and for once she feels something other than numb irritation at the male species.
Then he vanishes.
So far, so promising. The setup practically begs for a sharp, nasty little horror film about intimacy and obsession. Instead, what we get is a slow-burn where the burn is so slow you start checking your own pulse just to make sure you’re not the dead thing.
Alex starts seeing Kyle again… except sometimes he doesn’t know her. Sometimes things don’t add up. Is he a ghost? A glitch in reality? A metaphor for emotionally unavailable men who “don’t believe in labels”? The movie winks at all three, but rarely commits to any of them.
Bleak, Beautiful, and Basically Sleepy
Almost every positive review agrees on one thing: the movie looks and feels great. The unnamed city is shot as a liminal noir swamp—perpetually dark, neon-streaked, repetitive—a place where time is fake and everyone’s soul has 3% battery left.
There’s a dreamy, Argento-lite vibe in the saturated colors and nightscapes. The atmosphere is oppressive in a way that’s supposed to mirror Alex’s emotional state. You can practically smell the stale coffee, LED lighting, and emotional rot.
The problem is that at some point the movie seems to decide atmosphere is enough. Plot? Optional. Momentum? Overrated. Emotional development? We have fog machines now.
You sit there admiring the cinematography the way you’d admire wallpaper in a waiting room: “Yes, that’s very pretty. When does something happen?”
Blu Hunt Deserved a Less Dead Script
To be fair, Blu Hunt is doing the work. Reviewers have consistently praised her performance as raw, vulnerable, and committed. She plays Alex as a woman hovering between depression and compulsion, clinging to the one connection that doesn’t feel completely hollow—even if that connection might be with a guy who is either (a) dead, (b) supernatural, or (c) worse, a metaphor for “that one toxic situationship you should’ve blocked after the second red flag.”
Hunt’s eyes carry more story than the script does. You can see her trying to inject life into a character arc that mostly consists of:
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Swipe,
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Hook up,
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Feel empty,
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Meet Kyle,
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Become obsessed,
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Stare meaningfully at things while synth music hums.
The movie wants Alex to be a complex study of trauma, addiction, and unhealthy attachment. But character beats are so underwritten that she often feels less like a person and more like a concept: “Millennial Loneliness in Human Form.” Even a strong lead can’t completely rescue that.
Toxic Relationship… With Its Own Story
Kane clearly intends this as an allegory for toxic relationships: the way they make you feel trapped, the cyclical patterns, the way love curdles into obsession, possession, and self-erasure. Several critics have noted that the film is essentially a “stylish look at a toxic L.A. relationship” built on ghostly phenomena and emotional dependency.
That all sounds deliciously dark—until you realize the movie is better at suggesting themes than dramatizing them. Instead of escalating the horror of Alex’s situation, the story keeps circling: dates, disappearances, weirdness, repeat. The stakes never feel like they’re rising; they just kind of… stretch.
By the time the supernatural angle steps out of metaphor and into “No, really, spooky stuff is happening,” the film has already trained you not to expect much payoff. As one review put it, strip away the dreamy veneer and what’s left is “deader than a doornail.”
Slow-Burn or Just Slow?
There’s a difference between “slow-burn” and “sluggish,” and The Dead Thing spends a lot of time on the wrong side of that line. Critics who didn’t vibe with it have called out the pacing and narrative cohesion: good idea, slick execution, but the story feels like it’s wandering alone at night, checking its phone, hoping the plot will text back.
Scenes blur together:
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dim bars,
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anonymous apartments,
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softly lit sidewalks,
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murmured conversations about connection and emptiness.
In a tighter film, this repetition could build tension, creating a sense of inescapable doom. Here, it mostly creates a sense of, “Didn’t we shoot this already?”
When violence finally erupts—or when the horror elements push forward—they feel strangely arbitrary, puncturing the dreamy melancholy without enriching it. The kills and supernatural beats don’t land like inevitabilities of a doomed relationship; they land like, “Oh right, horror movie, better throw something bloody in.”
The Ending That Ghosts You
Even the people who like The Dead Thing tend to agree on one major complaint: the ending just kind of… evaporates. One critic memorably said it “ghosts its own ending,” and that’s exactly how it feels.
You wait for a big emotional or thematic payoff—some bold statement about obsession, about how we turn people into phantoms and fantasies, about how modern dating turns love into haunting. Instead, the movie shrugs, mumbles something cryptic, and wanders off into the night like a bad Tinder date who says, “I’ll message you,” and then never does.
Ambiguity can be powerful. Here, it mostly feels like the film ran out of either courage or time. All the mood in the world can’t make up for the sensation that the story just quietly disconnected the call.
Style Over Substance, Vibes Over Vision
To be clear, The Dead Thing is not an incompetent film. It’s well shot, well acted, and obviously made with thought and care. It even has a strong critical approval rating overall, with Rotten Tomatoes hovering in the 80% range—proof that plenty of reviewers are here for its moody, metaphorical take on online romance and emotional addiction.
But if you bounce off its wavelength, it’s very easy to see it as the worst kind of festival horror:
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so in love with its own atmosphere it forgets to move,
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so enamored with subtext it skimps on text,
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so determined to be “about something” it forgets to also be engaging.
It wants to say, “We are all haunted by the people we’ve loved,” but what you may walk away thinking is, “I just watched 94 minutes about how dating sucks, and somehow I am more tired than enlightened.”
Final Verdict: It’s Not You, It’s The Dead Thing
As a metaphor for toxic, cyclical, soul-sucking relationships, The Dead Thing is actually perfect—because watching it often feels like being in one. It starts off exciting and intriguing, looks great, makes big promises about meaning… and then slowly drains your energy while insisting you should be grateful for the vibes.
If you’re into ultra-moody, elliptical horror that prioritizes sad neon aesthetics and emotional malaise over plot and payoff, this might absolutely be your jam. For everyone else, don’t be surprised if halfway through you start fantasizing about breaking up with this movie.
It’s not that The Dead Thing is utterly lifeless; it’s that deep down, you know you could do better. And honestly? You deserve a horror-thriller that at least texts back with an ending.
