A horror film set in the 1980s with a synthesizer score is nothing new. But “Dead Mail,” the second feature from directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, manages to find a fresh angle on the nostalgic concept. Rather than heavy metal or riding bikes through the woods at night, “Dead Mail” aches for the fluorescent and olive of a Midwestern post office and the messy mimeographed look of paper fanzines.
Great care is given to aesthetics, and period detail; what’s accomplished visually on (one assumes) a limited budget is remarkable. McConaghy also shot the film, and the slightly overcast look is another of its virtues. On the whole, it’s thoughtfully directed, full of interesting angles and fussy, fetishistic montages. It has a special appreciation for cross-referencing and the pencil-and-paper legwork of analog data collection. It’s all part of an eccentric vision that’s dead serious about its weirdness, never breaking character even once.
“Dead Mail” begins as the story of Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a dead letter investigator in small-town Illinois who finds a mysterious, bloodied scrap of cardboard amid his usual pile of high-value items with incomplete addresses. Jasper is a rock star at the post office, which is charming; his coworker Bess (Susan Priver) talks about him like he’s a celebrity, lowering her voice and whispering, “that’s him” when he walks by in the lobby. He’s also living at a group home for men, implying that he’s experienced some sort of hardship in the past.
This tension is interesting, but ultimately unexplored. Jasper (the most compelling character in the film) disappears midway through, as DeBoer and McConaghy circle back to tell the story of how that bloody letter appeared in the mailbox in the first place. That’s where “Dead Mail” pivots into an “Amadeus”-meets-“Saw” type of thing, telling the story of Trent (John Fleck), a synthesizer enthusiast with no engineering expertise who becomes obsessed with the much more talented Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.).
Trent approaches Josh at a conference—staged in a perfectly mundane Midwestern basement—and starts chatting about the difficulty of artificially achieving a convincing woodwind tone. Josh has some ideas, and soon Trent is bankrolling Josh’s tinkering, providing him with all the high-quality epoxies and home-cooked teriyaki dinners that an inventor could ever need. Trent interprets this as a business partnership. But Josh proves himself ungrateful, selling out to the Japanese the moment he achieves that elusive, realistic sound. (The characters’ obsession with Japan is another offbeat ‘80s detail.) That’s how Trent interprets it, anyway, setting the horror portion of the movie into motion.
This does all loop back around to Jasper and his colleagues at the post office, but the connection is thin enough that “Dead Mail” feels more like a short film outfitted with a framing device than it does a feature-length narrative. The journey is full of memorable details, like the characters’ bizarre tendency to eat with their hands. (Josh has to shovel the food directly into his mouth after Trent handcuffs him to the sink in his bathroom, but that’s different.) Still, though, the momentum stalls fairly quickly, leading to a curiously low-energy climax.
“Dead Mail’s” quirkiness never grows tiresome, which is impressive. And the angle truly is unique. But the immaculately judged tone and deliberate craft have their downside: Perhaps inevitably, more attention is paid to setting than story. So while it’s not quite DOA, hopefully it’s a preview of work that’s fully realized in all aspects, not just the aesthetic ones.
