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‘Dead Mail’ Review: Friends Don’t Let Friends Leave the Torture Basement in Eerie, Eccentric Indie Thriller
Shudder's 'Dead Mail,' a new feature from Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, is an inventive kidnapping thriller about a musician trapped in a basement.
A particular nadir was the unimaginatively titled 2007 thriller “Captivity,” which featured Elisha Cuthbert as a blonde fashion model in a serial killer’s clutches, and had the distinction of being quite possibly the trashiest joint ever directed by an Oscar-nominated director (Roland Joffe, of “The Killing Fields”). The standard, if duly jarring, prologue finds a shackled African-American man plunging from an isolated home’s front door, literally crawling out to deposit a bloodied note in a mailbox at the curb — just before he’s brutally apprehended by his apparent keeper. Payton Jane’s production design, McConoghy’s cinematography, KerriAnne Savastano’s costumes and the location choices (Greater Los Angeles substituting for somewhere in the vicinity of Peoria) all create a subtly alienating environment without resorting to nostalgic caricature.
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