By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.9 cats
Director: Joe DeBoer | Kyle McConaghy
Starring: John Fleck | Micki Jackson | Sean Heyman | Sterling Macer Jr. | Susan Priver
Year: 2025
Running time: 106
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26474783
Julie says: “I loved this so much! It has it all! Thriller genre a fave of mine. Great use of sound and music. Great prod design and cinematography. Great story and great acting(some but not all very ironic)! Very dark, ironic, sometimes amusing film. Love the time it portrayed from the stand point of tech or lack there of. The end of an era before the wide use of internet, digital and cell phones.
I will add I am not a horror movie fan……I can’t really say more as don’t want to give anything away. 5 cats”
Laks says: “It’s only now that I’m catching up with one of my favourite (also rightfully criticised) BBC documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis’s Shifty . In the series, Adam depicts Trevor Horn and his invention of the Fairlight CMI (demonstrated in the series, using synthesised timpani drum) went on to define a new era in music that continued evolving to today. The power and strangeness (reality altering) of such a discovery is told in a very small, intimate and somewhat quirky comedic way in the fictional Dead Mail, where Josh is discovered by his soon to be inadvertent kidnapper and torturer, Trent, demonstrating his feat in having discover synthesising an specific pipe organ. The directors and writer have the foresight to depict the strangeness of the film with great video production echoing the strange new era of synthesised sounds emerging through visionary minds living bizarre, obsessive but downtrodden lives (so well depicted in the film by both being low budget and the characters spartan living conditions). While the writers may not have intended this for the film, I believe it was what made it so special and effective. – 4.8 Cats”