By Terry Sherwood
Katherine Dudas’ Theater Is Dead is a film that wears its ambitions proudly on its sleeve ambitious its packaging of a theme, interesting in execution, and indebted to a cliché version of Drama Schools and theater students everywhere. It is also a film divided against itself. The theater student in many viewers will likely smile knowingly at the improv games, the petty rivalries, the yearning for validation under harsh rehearsal lights. But the adult critic has other ideas like the sense that its promising concept needed two or three more drafts to fully come to life.
Firstly, I have experienced this film as I have extensive background theatre both amateur in name only and professional. I have directed shows, been on stage as an actor with various companies and in the booth as a tech. In fact, I was lucky in what was deemed impossible in the film to get your first role in your first audition, I did just that and others followed. This is like looking at bits of my life
At the center of this film is Willow (Decker Sadowski), a young woman trapped in a quarter-life crisis. Unsure of her future and feeling increasingly disconnected from her own ambitions, she decides to follow her actor father’s path and audition for a new stage production. The play’s director, Matthew Malvigo (Shane West), quickly emerges as the film’s villain figure: a magnetic, unsettling presence whose charisma masks something sinister. West’s performance is the kind of over-the-top theatrical menace
The early sections of the film operate almost like a lightly fictionalized documentary about small-town theater regional playhouse culture. The work captures the earnestness, the vulnerability, and the low-grade chaos that infuses community productions: exercises that feel like therapy sessions, rivalries that flare up during coffee breaks, and the unshakable belief that this show might be the one to change lives. These scenes are affectionate and frequently odd yet funny, especially with the support of an ensemble of Olivia Blue, Madison Lawlor, Colin McCalla, Zach Adler, Stephanie Sundanami.
But the biggest issue with Theater Is Dead is that these early chapters feel like the film that should have been sort of a genre version of A Chorus line or an ensemble-coming-of-age comedy while the horror element arrives so late and so abruptly that it feels grafted on rather than developed. Hints of Matthew’s malevolence appear early, but the film seems reluctant to commit to horror evening in a opening prologue, at which point it rushes through revelations, motivations, and consequences. The result is a climax that should feel shocking but instead comes off unfulfilling. If this film is to be a style of satire then it need to been further into the ground of Theatre of Blood with Vincent Price as the Shakespearean actor chewing the scenery for control and revenge.
If the film aims to explore the Faustian cost of fame, how ambition can be weaponized, how theater can be both sanctuary and snare then its protagonist feels miscast within its own thematic structure. Willow is a newcomer, still discovering who she wants to be, yet the story would arguably land more powerfully had it followed a veteran performer confronting a final, desperate shot at recognition.
Theater Is Dead displays a sense of comedic rhythm, and the film’s best moments are those where backstage banter and horror aesthetics collide mixes with moments and implied oral shenanigans at party. The ridiculous warm-up routines that have appoint in them yet are ludicrous coexist with blood, ego, and supernatural danger. The inclusion of Willow’s menstrual care startup while narratively odd recalls that the Theatre is a hard mistress, it makes you do things and demands commitment, Love and ritual, and the life female blood of Theatre is being sucked out of it in different ways. This is not the original Dario Argento’s Suspira or 1987 ‘s Opera in scope, budget or production look nor is it trying to be yet they all share the common ground of a Theatre.
The actors do their best with some lines right out of drama student speech, even in the payoff, which is somewhat predictable in nature, it is still fun to hear the dialogue. Horror and comedy are delicate partners, and here the balance wavers. But even in its missteps, the film radiates an earnest, almost guileless enthusiasm for the strange world of live theater. It reenforced what one of Teacher s told me that you can lean all the acting theory, if it’s not in you then you are not That nothing teaches you the art of acting then doing it on the boards.
Theater is Dead screened as part of Soho Horror Film Festival 2025.
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