By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Sterling Macer, Jr., John Fleck and Susan Priver
Written and directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy
Contact Light Films
DEAD MAIL begins with a grabber of an opening scene, then spends a good deal of its running time showing what led the two characters involved to that point. Not the least of the movie’s many achievements is that it keeps us engrossed in this narrative even though we know where it’s heading.
A world premiere at this month’s SXSW Film Festival, DEAD MAIL is just the kind of movie you hope to find at such an event: a very independent project crafted with confidence, care and a consistent commitment to its chosen approach. The style here is retro ’80s, the decade when the action happens, and even though it was shot digitally, you’d swear it was done on grainy, gritty 16mm film–or at least, this writer did before I was otherwise informed. Similarly, while DEAD MAIL lensed in California, you can believe immediately and throughout that it was shot where it’s set in Peoria County, IL. A good portion of the first act takes place in the local post office, where writer/directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy set up an engaging sense of community among the small-town characters.
These include Bess (Susan Priver) and Ann (Micki Jackson) who work in the “Mail Sortation Room.” Among their tasks is to separate “dead letters” and other items of unclear destination, and pass them on to Jasper (Tomas Boykin), an older employee who’s got a real knack for figuring out where these communications and packages should go. He’s established as a kind of hero, back in the days before communication became electronic, helping forge connections between people that might otherwise have been lost. Which is not to say that computers aren’t involved: Jasper even has a contact worthy of a spy thriller in Renee (Nick Heyman), a European hacker with whom Jasper communicates over the phone, who sits in front of nascent monitors and keyboards and speaks in clipped lines like “Context, please.”
All of these people are given distinctive, entertaining personalities that make the first portion of DEAD MAIL lively and most entertaining, and we haven’t even gotten to the pair of leads or the stuff that plants the movie in the horror genre. And not much should really be said about these elements, since part of the fun of DEAD MAIL, after the intense introductory bit and a shocking development about a half hour in, lies in watching the story unfold, surprising us and keeping us in suspense as it lays out its puzzle pieces and snaps them into place. Suffice it to say that the bulk of the film focuses on keyboard engineer Josh (Sterling Macer, Jr.) and Trent (John Fleck), the synthesizer enthusiast who becomes his patron, as they work together on a synth project that will perfectly emulate the tones of actual musical instruments.
We know from that first scene that this partnership is fated to go south in a big and bad way, yet rather than a sense of inevitability, DEAD MAIL elicits a slow-brewing tension from the scenes between Macer and Fleck, both of whom are excellent here and play very well off each other. Fleck in particular gives a fully committed while eminently controlled manic performance that does a lot to keep us on edge. So does the eerie and very appropriate electronic score by Janet Beat, the cinematography by McConaghy, which carries strong and evocative echoes of fright films past, and Payton Jane’s production design, which perfectly roots everything in a bygone decade with plenty of detail, both naturalistic and technological.
By the movie’s end, when DEAD MAIL catches back up to its beginning and takes us beyond, DeBoer and McConaghy have us in the palms of their hands, anxious to see how their tale will be resolved–and that it might not conclude well for some of its characters. Although this is not the duo’s first feature (they previously collaborated on BAB, and McConaghy’s solo venture SHEEPS CLOTHING just hit VOD), DEAD MAIL will very likely be their breakout film, and an introduction for many viewers to their idiosyncratic and significant talents. Many independent thrillers succeed due to their offbeat narrative invention, others through their intention to character, but in DEAD MAIL, DeBoer and McConaghy have crafted one that does both.
