The Dead Place review

By Simon Thompson

Writer/director Michael Pickle’s The Dead Place is a run of the mill teen supernatural thriller that ambles along to the finish line. This is a movie which suffers from poor cinematography, stagnant pacing, horrendous miscasting, and inconsistent acting. 

The Dead Place follows Isaac ( Idris Veliu), a troubled high school student haunted by visions of the dead. As a result of these visions, his relationship with his family is strained and he is treated as an outcast at his school, save for his only friend Katherine (Lexi Graves) who wants to understand and help him. Isaac’s problems go from bad to worse through the influence of a mysterious entity known as The New Kid (David Howard Thornton of Terrifier fame in his first speaking role), who is manipulating Isaac to give into a demon trying to posses him (Bill Oberst Jr). 

Pickle’s script and the pacing are both slow to the point of tedious. What kills the pace is how repetitive certain scenes and dialogue pieces are, with the worst offender probably being the interactions that Isaac has with his family, which are all so identical that they just blend into each other. 

The casting for the story’s supporting antagonists, a group of students who bully Isaac, is laughably bad given the fact that all of them seem to be in their late 20s-early 30s, have the characterisation of a CBBC special about bullying, and look about as convincing as teenagers as the cast of Dawson’s Creek did. Idris Veliu does a solid enough job as Isaac given that he doesn’t have the strongest material in the world to work with, David Howard Thornton’s psychotic Gilbert Gottfried style performance is easily the most watchable thing in this movie, and Lexi Graves shows real likeability as Katherine despite the various script limitations. 

The Dead Place is poorly lit and lacks any real character in terms of the sets and colour palette. Interior scenes in particular have a Goldilocks and the three bears style issue where they are either far too bright or not bright enough. To exacerbate things, the sound design is also extremely choppy, with certain dialogue scenes either being mixed like a Cynthia Rothrock VHS tape or having loud backing music which obscures the dialogue. 

Overall The Dead Place is a bad miniaturisation of other coming of age horror movies such as Donnie Darko, The Lost Boys or Near Dark that brings no new spin on the subgenre. Coming in at an hour and forty minutes it somehow feels like six hours instead.