Dear David is a drably disappointing “adaptation” of one of the wildest social media conspiracies this side of Zola’s #TheStory. Director John McPhail expands Adam Ellis’ strange “I’m being haunted” tweets about a spirit named David into a full-blown digital haunting, but a rather uninspired usage of typical ghoulish blueprints does the original hoax-or-not tale an injustice. Evan Turner and Mike Van Waes’ script is nowhere near as thrilling as reading Ellis’ tweets in real-time, despite giving the recorded events the ol’ horror movie treatment. It’s a shame, because McPhail has proven the ability to bring vibrancy and energy to horror (just watch his immaculate musical Anna and the Apocalypse). In comparison, Dear David feels watered-down and dull.
Augustus Prew stars as the Adam Ellis of 2017, a BuzzFeed staffer on the verge of breaking the internet. The illustrator finds himself in a professional lull, hounded by trolls who disparage his work as soulless now that he’s at BuzzFeed. After a night of deadlines, liquor and frustration come to a head, Adam tells one of his haters to “DIAF”—web slang for “Die In A Fire.” He sips another drink as his fanbase eviscerates another faceless foe with memes and gifs, feeling victorious until “@(D)___David” interrupts by asking him why he’s so mean. From then on, Adam starts to feel a presence that won’t let him rest—a boy named David who comes out to play every night.
Unfortunately, the chills and thrills of a glitchy entity birthed from toxic internet usage lack visual exceptionality. Adam’s bouts of sleep paralysis make him unable to defend against creepy David most nights, which is when Dear David is at its scariest. Experiencing sleep paralysis is terrifying—it’s something I’ve battled with—but that’s merely situational fear. The imagery of a sickly blue boy rocking in a chair with wholesale animated alterations hits with a whimper. As altercations increase in intensity, with knife play and typewriter bashings, there’s no reciprocal amplification of excitement on our side. McPhail doesn’t feel in control of the film’s horror language, cutting between normalcy and malevolence without much change in atmosphere.
It’s telling how reading Ellis’ tweets and watching his smartphone videos stir more unsettling feelings than a fully produced film’s reinterpretations.
At the core of Dear David is an important anti-bullying message and a take on tortured artist storytelling. Prew plays Adam as an anxious commitment-phobe crumbling under the pressure of click-driven notoriety, but the script’s inability to key into anything beyond cardboard-tasting takes on these problems is an issue. The way Adam barricades himself in a self-destructive bubble is blatant, creating a stench of shoehorned drama that never clears. How he pushes away his saintly patient boyfriend Kyle (René Escobar Jr.) feels coincidentally focused on keeping Adam alone. Justin Long’s portrayal of a generic BuzzFeed manager borders on satire and caricature too closely. Dear David is never BuzzFeed propaganda, but it fails to settle in as a BuzzFeed-produced horror tale that feels most accomplished within its BuzzFeed office shots.
But it’s not all damaged pipes that leak dread and despair. Dear David features flashes of originality, like a scene where Adam is controlled like a video game by some mask-wearing devil—a first-person playable possession, that’s pretty rad. Andrea Bang has some cheeky bites of humor playing Adam’s coworker Evelyn, who sweetly mocks Adam for thinking he’s in Ghostbusters. The ideas are there—like when Adam explores David’s pitch-black Under the Skin realm or in the sparse scares that rise above the film’s airless environment—but they’re all hindered by a production that outwardly presents like it’s under budgetary constraints. You can sense McPhail is doing his best with fewer resources, but the ceiling is bump-your-head low.
It’s a shame because nothing that McPhail has excelled at delivering in the past shines through in Dear David, nor do the story’s embellishments from Ellis’ otherwise effective ghost story play better than what already exists. Its emotions lack meatiness, its character relationships are plastic-fake, and the centerpiece horror happenings each night barely raise hairs. Everything feels muted, from the narrative themes to the leap-at-the-screen frights, which isn’t the experience you want from an October release about undead children tormenting online bullies. You can’t fault an attempt to transform a viral sensation into the next bonkers realization of contemporary horror that exploits our ever-volatile online climate—but you can always fault a genre film that doesn’t do the chosen genre justice.
Director: John McPhail
Writer: Mike Van Waes, Evan Turner
Starring: Augustus Prew, Andrea Bang, René Escobar Jr., Cameron Nicoll, Justin Long
Release Date: October 13, 2023
Matt Donato is a Los Angeles-based film critic currently published on SlashFilm, Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and anywhere else he’s allowed to spread the gospel of Demon Wind. He is also a member of the Hollywood Critics Association. Definitely don’t feed him after midnight.