Dead Mail – SXSW Review

This lo-fi early-80s mystery thriller is a strange cocktail of amateur sleuthing, unexpected violence, and atonal synth music. Unconventional, engrossing and empathetic.

★★★★

Dead Mail opens a cheap house on desolate, county road, in 1982 Illinois. A bound Black man (Sterling Macer Jr., Where The Crawdads Sing), bursts out of the door and crawls towards a postal box, dragging a chain behind him. He just has time to stuff a blood-stained note into the slot before an unseen second figure rushes screaming from the house and knocks him unconscious.

The note arrives at the dead letter office of the county post office, and into the hands of Jasper (Tomas Boykin, 3 From Hell), an expert investigator, responsible for putting lost mail in the hands of its rightful owners. Discarding it as a prank, Jasper returns home to the men’s shelter where he lives. He’s been assigned a new bunk-mate, Trent (John Fleck, Velvet Buzzsaw), who shares Trent’s keen interest in plastic model kits. But how do these pieces fit together, who sent the note? Who will live or die? And what does this all have to do with the world of electronic analogue synthesizers?

What follows is full of amateur sleuthing, sudden violence, and unexpected levels of atonal 80s synth dronecore. Dead Mail is an elliptical mystery thriller about parasocial friendships, reminiscent of Computer Chess in its scuzzy vibes and grainy aesthetics. It’s deliberately lo-fi throughout – it even has audible room tone changes as it switches scenes. Its shot composition its unsettling and its sound design vaguely oppressive, but its performances (particularly Boykin’s) are full of idiosyncratic humanity.

It’s also worth pointing out that both of the film‘s Black male characters receive significant violence at the hands of another character. They aren’t the only characters to be hurt, but they are the most prominent, and combined with with some of the imagery (shackles, forced labour), there’s a theme here that some may find hard to digest.

That said, Dead Mail presents a very interesting and non-obvious marriage of aesthetics, mise-en-scène and story. It feels different from everything else I’ve seen recently, in a prickly kind of way. With content warning in place, I recommend checking it out.

Dead Mail played at SXSW

WARNING: Mild spoilers in this trailer, but its worth a look to get a sense of the wonderful grainy aesthetics and vibes.