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***/**** starring Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes written by Webb Wilcoxen and Elric Kane directed by Elric Kane
by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse where one of the last surviving citizens of an apocalyptic Tokyo stumbles into a forbidden room–the sort of room Tarkovsky locates in his wastelands now and again–and meets a phantom who tells him that death is “eternal loneliness.” The Internet has become the kind of trap divers warn about: a technological rapture of the deep that presents a sanctuary for the wayward spirit, the parts in everyone that are lost, never mind that there’s no air in there and the pressures of continuing to exist as a version of yourself are obliterating. Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing has similar thoughts on its mind, 23 years down the electric road from Pulse (a gap which, if measured in terms of gadget generations, may as well be millennia ago), in considering what happens to the soul when courtship and physical touch is primarily, if not exclusively, mediated through viewscreens and algorithms. The Dead Thing wonders what would happen if you invested so much of yourself into an electronic web that when you died, an echo of you lived there forever. I mean, is that even science-fiction? It’s a good ghost story, in other words, but it’s an even better spiritual piece about the nature of eternity.
Beautiful, bored Alex (Blu Hunt) spends her days at a dire cubicle job, swiping left in an endless search for Mr. Right that’s led only to empty one-night stands. An early montage of her sexual exploits intercut with her lonesome taxi rides home reminds me a lot of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millennium Mambo, another tactile, sexy film about a young woman who can’t find her way through the tangle of herself or her city. Alex lives with moribund Cara (Katharine Hughes), who is mourning a broken engagement to nebbish Paul (Brennan Mejia), and a sunlamp Alex sits herself in front of as an act of self-adoration/abuse into the small hours of the morning. She’s a distaff Prufrock at a quarter of the life, measuring her days out in notches on her headboard. When all looks lost, she hooks up with handsome, happy Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen) and discovers, to her surprise, feelings of love for him. But Kyle ghosts her. Rather than move on, she looks for him: at his apartment, at his work… Maybe she can’t find him because he’s just an idea. More likely, he’s dead.
The Dead Thing is not unlike Laura, in which the hero falls in love with a dead person based on a portrait and suffers the unbearable weight of unrelieved longing. How many of our relationships are formed and sustained in the same way? Kyle can only ever be who he is at a specific moment in time, but Alex isn’t much different, stuck in a daily cycle to such an extent that by the end of the film, she can’t tell the days apart and shows up to work in a cocktail dress. I love the way sex is shot in this film, how Kane locates the vulnerability of that interaction when one partner loses control, which is to say when both partners lose control. Alex has an orgasm towards the end of the film that is so protracted and merciless she seems like she’s in more agony than ecstasy. (Shades of Frank Henenlotter’s Bad Biology.) She can’t breathe, and it goes on for long enough to become frightening. Sex is the negotiation of boundaries and faith that your partner isn’t there to harm you when you’ve made yourself prone. Alex navigates the world with a thick barrier between herself and others. Once she finally allows herself to feel something, it’s with a phantom. There’s a lesson there, or a warning, or both.
