FANTASIA24 REVIEW: The Dead Thing [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 94 minutes
Release Date: February 14th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: IFC Films / Shudder
Director(s): Elric Kane
Writer(s): Elric Kane & Webb Wilcoxen

We don’t really need to talk, do we?

Caught in the throes of twenty-first century technology, death is no longer the end for us. We’ve become immortalized online through social media, our footprint vaster than we even think it is unless you’re the type of person who diligently ensures the spread gets curbed. Between those sites we voluntarily place our identity on and those that scrape our data to sell it in the background, it’s not uncommon to find yourself stumbling upon someone who looks well and happy despite their obituary popping up a few links lower on the Google search.

Director Elric Kane and co-writer Webb Wilcoxen play with this digital echo via their film The Dead Thing. The title itself provides dual meaning insofar as it describes the ghost that’s desperately reaching out to cling to life as a means of staving off oblivion and the living person to which it grabs hold. Because even though Alex (Blu Hunt) isn’t dead, she’s sleepwalking through life. Each day is the same: sleeping beneath a UV light, working the third shift at an office scanning documents, and hooking up with a revolving door of suitors via the dating app Friktion. The only real drama she has is whether she’ll be able to sneak by her roommate’s (Katherine Hughes’ Cara) door when she returns home.

This is why Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen) feels so different. He doesn’t try to force small talk and yet she could talk to him for days on end. While all the other dates barely keep her awake before finally mustering the courage to take her to bed, he gets her to smile … and smile often. Alex even starts telling him about her malaise and the desire to break free from it. She lets herself be vulnerable with Kyle. She even takes him home instead of the other way around. So, when he ghosts her after an hours-long sleepover, it doesn’t make sense. Their connection seemed real. It felt like it might last.

Suddenly Alex becomes the clinger. Texting multiple times without a response. Even stalking him when she sees him with another woman out at a bar. The need to hear back has her tethered to her phone more than usual both in the hopes he finally replies and the desire to hold onto that night via the songs they listened to and the drawings of each other that they drew. And while the film doesn’t turn into an artificial intelligence tale, you can sense that Alex has formed a relationship with the potential of who Kyle is. The picture on his dating profile. The message log with his phone number. The life approximated by his social media galleries.

Then that illusion goes one step further into the supernatural once she and Kyle come together again. The ghost in the machine who’s actually outside the machine. The ghost who can only commune with the living through the still active channels of his digital avatar. And taking that step means providing him a lifeline too. He uses that echo to remain. He uses Alex’s longing to reflect who he wants to be rather than what he’s become. Her desperation to cling to his warmth is thus also reciprocated. But rather than just his touch, Kyle needs her devotion. That means everyone else—Cara and her co-worker Chris (John Karna)—is an obstacle he cannot afford to take her attention away.

I wasn’t exactly sure where Kane and company were taking The Dead Thing. The romance is sweet at first. Like a rebirth for Alex that ultimately gives others the wrong idea considering she goes from morose to electric overnight. And when she loses that in his absence, you wonder if their reunion will simply be like a drug addiction of lost time and shirked responsibilities. Even when the notion of violence enters, it does so through fear and therefore seems like an outlier instead of a sign of things to come. But it is a tease for more. The notions of codependency and parasocial relationships come into focus to turn this tale of love at first sight into a tragic nightmare of urban legend and IRL catfishing.

It’s an effective thriller that lets its themes exist beneath the surface so that those uninterested in delving deeper can simply enjoy the ghost story turned quasi-slasher on its own merits. The latter works thanks to Kyle’s fear-driven survival instincts, but the former is what sticks with you courtesy of Hunt’s performance. And for those who love to keep saying sex scenes are unnecessary in cinema, it’s her work during them that really shines. Because these moments aren’t merely about pleasure. They’re also about power. You can see it in her face as it moves from ecstasy to distress. The shift is quick too. That realization that love has become obsession and how it might already be too late to stop.