By Terry Sherwood
Dawid Torrone’s Dead by Dawn. from Poland bills itself as a giallo slasher that drops a group of actors into the crumbling Heissenhoff Theater that proceed to meet their end. Rehearsals begin, something feels off, and soon enough a masked killer is stalking the cast through dark corridors and empty rooms. But what makes this one stand out is the sheer visual sense of every frame hugely reminiscent of Dario Argento’s original Suspira, his later film Opera and a health dose of Bioshock ambience minus the teleportation chambers The result is brilliant excess on the outer edges of Ken Russell and Bob Fosse particularly in the interpretive movement moments which are part of the pay the actors are rehearsing.
The camera letting drifts down long hallways or sits on a character just in moment of pause make the image look like a frozen moment from a theatrical production which in fact it is. In one section you have a figure running down a bright hall which is huge significant in that the same sequence was replayed in many the then innovative for 1932 for camera movement seminal precode mystery The Bat Whispers. Bright colors also give it the Giallo heritage with white color playing a part in the lobby scene from The Bird with Crystel Plumage. In this current age of let the silence play with tree like David Lean, this is a refreshing approach. This is a visual film, so it is fitting that symbolically this has a mask of eyeballs that fits perfectly with the film’s obsession with watching and being watched.
The Heissenhoff Theater is filled with shadows, mirrors, and decaying elegance. Every corner feels like a trap. Reflections are used constantly, sometimes to reveal danger, sometimes just to mess with your sense of space. It gives the film a kind of dreamlike quality, where you’re never quite sure what’s real or where the threat is coming from
The people that inhabit this world of a theatre are more on the basic side. You can tell them apart, and they each have their own quirks, with some scappy dialogue about Art and consumer society tossed in from the script of theplay they are rehearsing. The problem is that the film occasionally tries to give them more weight through long, talky scenes that try to get emotional yet seem shallow. Mind you are actors tossed together to do a play on a deadline so its the work that is important
The pacing is not jumping scare ride which is what it should be making those moments stand out with some brutal violence. There’s one early scene involving a meat cleaver and a technical both that is viewed by the cast that is not shy about getting nasty.
One of the characters experiences strange visions, and as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that this isn’t just a random killer picking people off. There’s something bigger, darker, and a lot weirder behind it all. The film doesn’t spell everything out, which works in its favor. By the time you hit the final act—a blood-soaked ritual that cranks things up to another level you’re left with more questions than answers, but in a good way. It adds a sense that what you’re watching is part of something beyond human control.
The tone can feel uneven, especially when the movie throws in music choices that don’t quite match the mood which is a strategy to unnerve the audience with much like Bernard Herriman’s violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stanely Kubrick used this device in A Clockwork Orange, with the Droogs murdering to the strains of Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain.
Dead by Dawn isn’t a character-driven horror or a straight-up gore fest it’s something in between. This is not just a “Good ‘genre film its a ‘Good film in many ways with reverence for process, a committed cast and use of full frame for dread. Broken into chapters much like acts of play and subtitled mercifully not in a English dubbed version it’s a work that leans heavily on mood, style, and tension, with enough blood and creativity to keep horror fans with a taste for spectacle on a scale satisfied. The Play is the thing.
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