Dead Mail

Heading back to the 1980’s with its hazy VCR appearance Dead Mail opens with a chained man struggling out a house to post a blood-spattered note, before being dragged back in.

The note ends up at a local sorting office who happen to employ an expert on deciphering addresses. Jasper (Tomas Boykin) takes his work seriously both for sense of public duty and for his own accomplishment having had setbacks during his life.

The note arrives on Jasper’s desk and he sets about identifying the address using his contacts local and international. Its while he’s working on this note that he’s attacked and killed, by a man whom he met at the shelter he stays at and bunked with the night before, Trent (John Fleck).

The focus then shifts to Trent and Josh (Sterling Macer Jr), the latter an electronics engineer in the early days of synthesisers whom Trent meets at a convention. Proposing a deal, Josh ends up a Trent’s house to work on the instrument only for it to get much denser once a few things come to light.

Written and directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, Dead Mail is set in 80’s with none of the plastic glam of the time. This small-town America at its grimiest and the vaguely fake docudrama feel and look, seals it.

In the middle is Trent. As odious and skin-crawling a character as you will ever see on screen. One however that you feel the writers wanted to have some element of sympathy for, yet despite his backstory he cannot be redeemed. It’s a genuinely chilling performance from Fleck here.

Telling the story out of order is probably a caprice of the filmmakers but along with the end credits, ensures the film is that more intriguing as the gaps are filled and characters developed. Not overtly violent, what there is grubby and unpleasant with no sense of stylisation.

What also drips the 80’s into the film is the sparse and atonal electronic score by DeBoer and McConaghy.

Dead Mail is available now on Shudder.