In the Flesh: Dead Mail

There’s a moment in Dead Mail I’ve never really seen in anything else. Uptight, sexually repressed Trent Whittington (John Fleck) speaks over a private audio address system to his kidnapping victim, electronic music technician Josh Ivey (Sterling Macer Jr.), pouring his heart out to the other man in a one-sided monologue as Josh lies unresponsive in a sleeping bag on a cold concrete floor. Trent talks about growing up deeply closeted and isolated — the metaphor he uses is being sealed inside an oil drum with only a single cutout slit to view the world — with only his unrequited and not quite admissible even to himself infatuation with his college track teammate, Reggie, to provide a glimpse of what it is to experience human life. When Reggie moved on to international competition, even that brief contact with reality disappeared. That Trent says all this to Josh through the soundproof skylight of a locked basement is an irony which does not penetrate Trent’s delusional private bubble, but the poignant nature of his confessional is only heightened by its bizarre naïveté. He has transformed his entire existence into an extension of his awful, curdled loneliness, refracting his pain through the lens of the Black men on whom he has spent his life fixated. He can’t bring himself to touch another human being with love, so he isolates them as he himself is isolated, bringing them into the intimacy of that great yawning emptiness.

In a film so concerned with solitude and loneliness, it feels like touching a live wire to see someone at once so deeply connected to it and so achingly unaware of how it affects him. Fleck’s prim, fastidious mannerisms give him the air of some sort of wading bird, solitary and aloof, but also slightly hapless, almost comical. Dead letter investigator Jasper’s (Tomas Boykin) cool, relaxed affect and postal clerk Ann’s (Micki Jackson) natural confidence are perfect foils to his off-putting uptightness, so much so that one could almost wish more of the film followed their detective work in pursuit of Josh’s desperate letter. Still, what we do get is compelling, logical, and smoothly presented. Even the slightly shaggy beginning and the sometimes unfocused framing don’t detract from the film’s overall tightness, and the sense of tension it creates with Josh’s incarceration is so elegantly constructed that by the time Ann and Bess (Susan Priver) are going door to door trying to find their mystery man it’s stomach-churning just to watch Trent dredge chicken breasts in flour. 

Writer/director/composers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy are still finding their footing visually, though Dead Mail is by no means a failure in that regard, but their score shows much more polish and precision. From hazy, suspenseful strings (there’s a lovely homage to the eyeball-in-the-doorway shot from Black Christmas) to the earnest synthesized woodwinds of Josh’s keyboard patch, the melancholy renditions of ‘Clair de Lune’ and other classic compositions, there is a tremendous sense of passionate craftsmanship of the same kind which undergirds each loving shot of Josh soldering and gluing circuits to his board. Indeed, analog work of the kind represented by electronic synthesizer programming and dead letter investigations are both frequently handled with more elegance and attention to detail than shots of the film’s characters. Dead Mail is a grainy, textured love letter (no pun intended) to the 1980s and its less-celebrated aesthetics, but it’s the uncanny heart it displays which makes it truly special.