94 min | R | October 13, 2023 | Lionsgate
An illustrator dreams of a dead boy with a crushed skull who climbs one stair closer to his bedroom every night. He posts the haunting online and watches it go viral. The thread was scarier than the movie.
Adam Ellis is an illustrator who starts having nightmares about a dead boy with a caved-in skull. The boy is named David. The boy wants to climb the stairs to Adam’s bedroom, and each night he gets one step closer. John McPhail builds the film around a real viral phenomenon, the 2017 Twitter thread where the actual Adam Ellis live-tweeted his haunting to a growing audience. The film is about an artist who turns his terror into content and watches the engagement numbers climb. That is a genuinely modern horror idea. The movie has no interest in following it anywhere unsettling.
Augustus Prew plays Adam as a man who reacts to a child ghost with mild concern. He never seems to be in danger because the film never lets him be. Andrea Bang plays Evelyn, the coworker who half-believes him, and she delivers exposition about the haunting with the energy of someone reading a Wikipedia summary. Justin Long plays Bryce, Adam’s editor, and treats the entire supernatural crisis as a traffic opportunity. Long is the only actor who finds a joke worth playing, and the film does not give him enough room to land it.
McPhail directs from a script by Mike Van Waes that mistakes a creepypasta premise for a structure. The scare construction telegraphs every appearance of David. The camera holds on an empty doorway, the score swells, and the boy arrives exactly when the editing promises he will. The dream sequences pile on green and blue color grading to signal that we have left reality, which removes any chance of mistaking nightmare for waking life. The production design renders the cat-haunting subplot literally, with a possessed cat staring at walls, and the literalism kills the dread.
Dear David takes a story that worked because it was unverifiable and films every ambiguity as fact. The original thread scared people because they could not tell where the performance ended. The adaptation answers every question and stages every threat, and the answers are boring. This is a horror film with no fear in it. It turns a haunting into homework and forgets that the audience already knows how the thread ended.