Before getting to the movie itself, a few disclosures are in order. I am a Dropout subscriber and a fairly devoted one. I spend roughly as much time there as I do on Netflix, Apple TV, Prime Video, and Hulu combined, which says something flattering about their programming or something bleak about me. I am also midway through a later season of Dimension 20, Never Stop Blowing Up, and enjoying it a great deal. All of which is to say that D(e)AD was never going to be a neutral viewing experience.
I also tend to approach first-time feature filmmakers with a degree of mercy. This is the first film written by the mother-daughter team of Isabella Roland, who penned the script, and Claudia Lonow, who directed it. I am not especially interested in taking swings at artists who are still finding their balance in a medium with an absurdly steep learning curve. If Scorsese or Coppola had been permanently written off after the lukewarm receptions to Who’s That Knocking at My Door? or Dementia 13, we would be worse off for it. Film history is full of early stumbles that only matter until the real work arrives.
That said, calling D(e)AD an awkward first step would be disingenuous, lazy, and flat out wrong. Thematically, it plays like an unexpected companion piece to Went Up the Hill, the bracing New Zealand film that ends with Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps attempting to drown each other while also, somehow, trying to save each other, as a hostile spirit pinballs between them. D(e)AD does not operate on that wavelength. It has little appetite for horror. This is a dramedy that happens to include a ghost.
The film is largely focused on the relationship between father and daughter, Daniel and Tillia, played by Craig Bierko and Isabella Roland. Bierko, it should be said, delivers what is quite possibly the performance of his career. A few minutes into this brisk eighty-two-minute emotional pressure cooker, Daniel dies of brain cancer. No prizes for guessing who our resident ghost turns out to be.
As in Went Up the Hill, the film wastes no time establishing who the ghost is and what they want, treating the apparition as a character rather than an anonymous menace in the Paranormal Activity, The Grudge, or The Ring mold. D(e)AD fits neatly into a recent run of mostly independent films that includes His Three Daughters, Presence, and Went Up the Hill itself, all released within about thirteen months of one another. The similarities feel less like theft than convergence, a handful of filmmakers circling the same questions at roughly the same moment. I also happen to like all of these movies quite a bit. I should probably fill in some gaps and finally watch the touchstones hovering over them, Ghost, After Life, The Sixth Sense which my friends remain appalled I have avoided despite how often I go to bat for Trap and A Knock at the Cabin, and David Lowery’s 2017 emotional cudgel, A Ghost Story.
The film’s control of tone is genuinely impressive, reminiscent of Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby from last year. D(e)AD is a touch zanier and far lighter, but it navigates those shifts with confidence. The cartoon logic of the relationship between Tillie’s sister Violet and her husband Eric leans hard into silliness, with Violet eight months pregnant and Eric somehow entirely unaware. There is also the pleasing orbital weirdness of Tillie’s love interest Owen, played by Isabella Roland’s real-life husband Brennan Lee Mulligan, who seems to be undergoing an offscreen arc running parallel to Tillie’s, only involving banshees instead of a ghost.
D(e)AD is a little brisk for its own good, though given its scrappy, crowdfunded origins, that is difficult to hold against it. The reported budget sits at around $258,000, assuming the GoFundMe page is accurate, a figure that is more than triple the original ask of $75,000. At that scale, you make the movie you can before the money runs out and your life implodes. While the pacing does feel rushed, especially once the story fully kicks in, those choices read less like creative impatience than the unavoidable pressure of severe financial limits.
To be blunt, this movie lands on a very exposed nerve. After a disagreement about health insurance, my father tried to have what he framed as a practical conversation about fixing the situation. I brushed him off. In response, he took my car, the one I had been paying for and maintaining for five years. It was still in his name, so he was well within his legal rights. After a short, ugly phone call, I told him that I would, in all likelihood, never speak to him again. I am comfortable putting that in this already too long Letterboxd review. I know he will not read it. The closing montage of Tillie screaming, crosscut with Daniel laughing as he is released into whatever comes next, is not especially elegant in its construction, but it hit me with a force that bypassed craft entirely and went straight for the throat.
Before getting to the movie itself, a few disclosures are in order. I am a Dropout subscriber and a fairly devoted one. I spend roughly as much time there as I do on Netflix, Apple TV, Prime Video, and Hulu combined, which says something flattering about their programming or something bleak about me. I am also midway through a later season of Dimension 20, Never Stop Blowing Up, and enjoying it a great deal. All of which is to say that D(e)AD was never going to be a neutral viewing experience.
I also tend to approach first-time feature filmmakers with a degree of mercy. This is the first film written by the mother-daughter team of Isabella Roland, who penned the script, and Claudia Lonow, who directed it. I am not especially interested in taking swings at artists who are still finding their balance in a medium with an absurdly steep learning curve. If Scorsese or Coppola had been permanently written off after the lukewarm receptions to Who’s That Knocking at My Door? or Dementia 13, we would be worse off for it. Film history is full of early stumbles that only matter until the real work arrives.
That said, calling D(e)AD an awkward first step would be disingenuous, lazy, and flat out wrong. Thematically, it plays like an unexpected companion piece to Went Up the Hill, the bracing New Zealand film that ends with Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps attempting to drown each other while also, somehow, trying to save each other, as a hostile spirit pinballs between them. D(e)AD does not operate on that wavelength. It has little appetite for horror. This is a dramedy that happens to include a ghost.
The film is largely focused on the relationship between father and daughter, Daniel and Tillia, played by Craig Bierko and Isabella Roland. Bierko, it should be said, delivers what is quite possibly the performance of his career. A few minutes into this brisk eighty-two-minute emotional pressure cooker, Daniel dies of brain cancer. No prizes for guessing who our resident ghost turns out to be.
As in Went Up the Hill, the film wastes no time establishing who the ghost is and what they want, treating the apparition as a character rather than an anonymous menace in the Paranormal Activity, The Grudge, or The Ring mold. D(e)AD fits neatly into a recent run of mostly independent films that includes His Three Daughters, Presence, and Went Up the Hill itself, all released within about thirteen months of one another. The similarities feel less like theft than convergence, a handful of filmmakers circling the same questions at roughly the same moment. I also happen to like all of these movies quite a bit. I should probably fill in some gaps and finally watch the touchstones hovering over them, Ghost, After Life, The Sixth Sense which my friends remain appalled I have avoided despite how often I go to bat for Trap and A Knock at the Cabin, and David Lowery’s 2017 emotional cudgel, A Ghost Story.
The film’s control of tone is genuinely impressive, reminiscent of Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby from last year. D(e)AD is a touch zanier and far lighter, but it navigates those shifts with confidence. The cartoon logic of the relationship between Tillie’s sister Violet and her husband Eric leans hard into silliness, with Violet eight months pregnant and Eric somehow entirely unaware. There is also the pleasing orbital weirdness of Tillie’s love interest Owen, played by Isabella Roland’s real-life husband Brennan Lee Mulligan, who seems to be undergoing an offscreen arc running parallel to Tillie’s, only involving banshees instead of a ghost.
D(e)AD is a little brisk for its own good, though given its scrappy, crowdfunded origins, that is difficult to hold against it. The reported budget sits at around $258,000, assuming the GoFundMe page is accurate, a figure that is more than triple the original ask of $75,000. At that scale, you make the movie you can before the money runs out and your life implodes. While the pacing does feel rushed, especially once the story fully kicks in, those choices read less like creative impatience than the unavoidable pressure of severe financial limits.
To be blunt, this movie lands on a very exposed nerve. After a disagreement about health insurance, my father tried to have what he framed as a practical conversation about fixing the situation. I brushed him off. In response, he took my car, the one I had been paying for and maintaining for five years. It was still in his name, so he was well within his legal rights. After a short, ugly phone call, I told him that I would, in all likelihood, never speak to him again. I am comfortable putting that in this already too long Letterboxd review. I know he will not read it. The closing montage of Tillie screaming, crosscut with Daniel laughing as he is released into whatever comes next, is not especially elegant in its construction, but it hit me with a force that bypassed craft entirely and went straight for the throat.
