Given its debut today on American horror genre streamer Shudder, there will no doubt be a marketing push to play up the horror elements of directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail, which bears a title that does feel right at home in the genre. This is only understandable, in terms of the prerogative to put butts in the seat for what otherwise might be an especially challenging film to market, but to think of Dead Mail primarily as a “horror movie” is doing a disservice to its deep, abiding weirdness. There are flashes of nail-biting suspense in this utterly unique feature, but for every sharp intake of breath there’s just as much unexpected tenderness and pathos that verges on genuine sweetness, albeit twisted by the kind of pervading loneliness experienced by an obsessive aesthetician who has no peers in our society. Categorizing Dead Mail is the exact sort of detective challenge faced by those sorting letters in the film’s post office dead letter unit: It’s a psychological aesthete crime story with occasional giallo tendencies, a film that will immediately become one of the strangest and most unconventional things on Shudder. And given the company it’s keeping here, that’s saying something.
Dead Mail is a film about obsessive, analytical personalities … but also romantic ones, a consistent throughline that is the ultimate driver of barbaric behavior in an antagonist/protagonist who is motivated, more than anything else, by a love of beauty. We see the same humanist strain of obsession early on as we’re introduced to dead letter investigator Jasper (Tomas Boykin), a solitary man who toils in a 1980s, wood-paneled post office back room to piece together the forgotten cast-offs that find their way to his desk: Letters and parcels missing addresses, names and the data necessary to get them where they’re intended to go. Co-workers like Ann (Micki Jackson) and Bess (Susan Priver) speak of Jasper as if he has some kind of genius or mystical gift in reuniting these items with their intended recipients, missing that what Jasper truly possesses is the sheer determination to apply slow, brute force logic to these problems. When a necklace with deep sentimental value gets lost in the mail, for instance, we see his methods in action as he notes potential identifying traits in the attached letter, and then cross-references them with public listings, narrowing down a large pool of potential answers before cold-calling each house in an attempt to find the recipient. Jasper isn’t some kind of savant; his gift is that he cares enough about what he’s doing, whether that’s his job or hobbies like building and painting tiny models, to be methodical in a way that is beyond most of us in our self obsession.
For most films, this would be plenty for a launching point–a determined dead letter investigator comes across a blood-smeared “HELP” note in the mail, and begins hunting for a dangerous man in hopes of freeing the unfortunate prisoner. That’s where Dead Mail veers from any form of convention, however, ditching the thought of Jasper as our primary protagonist around 20 minutes in, with a pivot that reads as more and more audacious as the film continues on and we slowly realize that we’ve been given an entirely new central character.
That would be Trent (John Fleck), a man who we learn, via an extended flashback that takes up the majority of the runtime, is a music lover with a sensitive aural palate and a deep appreciation for keyboards and synthesizers. At a convention, Trent meets a kindred spirit in the form of Josh (Sterling Macer Jr.), a synthesizer tinkerer who is attempting to perfect the sound of certain instruments (such as woodwinds) with his own keyboard technology. Eagerly, Trent forges a patron relationship with Josh, bankrolling and lavishing his work with praise as Josh moves into his basement to craft the ultimate synthesizer. If this sounds difficult to believe in the context of a “horror movie” premise, that’s because it feels like the furthest thing from the genre at the time–what we have instead is a quirky and even tender story about two aesthetic geeks bonding over their love of esoteric sounds, set at times to the strains of “Clair de Lune,” the romantic tension between the two impossible to dismiss. It feels for all intents and purposes like the nerdiest love story you’ve ever seen, even as the tension begins to ramp up, given that we already know it’s leading toward Josh frantically crawling toward escape, cramming a bloody note in the public mailbox. Dead Mail methodically loops all the way back around to its opening 20 minutes as an increasingly desperate and delusional Trent digs himself in deeper as he attempts to see the project through to its completion.