Dear David, the latest film based on a viral Twitter thread, arrives way too late to have any relevance or connection to how the terminally online crowd can behave. The film centers on a handful of Buzzfeed staffers, a site that held the internet’s imagination for a time only to be made a husk of itself due to a series of deep staffing cuts. Even the mere idea of a viral Twitter thread is obsolete because Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom, has taken everything worthwhile about the social media network and strangled it to appease his insatiable ego. Similar to the recent film Dumb Money, Dear David bases its story on an internet phenomena its creators barely understand. And to top it off, it is ostensibly a horror film that only offers a ham-fisted metaphor instead of any scares or terror.
Co-produced by Buzzfeed Studios, screenwriter Mike Van Waes imagines a version of the New York-based digital media site that is somewhat self-aware. The staffers all speak like the internet has rotted their brain, while Justin Long plays a facsimile of Jonah Peretti, the head of the site who is always looking for new ways to go viral or ways connect memes to other kinds of media. In this milieu is Adam (Augustus Prew), a graphic designer and cartoonist who uses his drawings as an outlet for his many anxieties. Metrics, clicks and other kinds of engagement are the true currency at this company, and Adam gets respectable–if not amazing–numbers until he grows convinced that his apartment is haunted. He engages with the community, enlisting his friend Evelyn (Andrea Bang) to help perform an exorcism, which only makes the ghost in his apartment that much angrier.
Director John McPhail does not understand the rhythm of a good horror film. He is too impatient: he regularly leaves little room for anticipation, so the typical payoff–a jump scare–has no sense of excitement or release. Adam starts to lose his mind, a metaphor for “online brain” that happens to people who post too much, although we do not worry about him because, well, Adam is a deeply unlikable protagonist. He is an asshole to his boyfriend Kyle (René Escobar Jr.), and the kind of user who nastily engages with trolls instead of ignoring them (I looked up the real Adam’s Twitter/X profile, and was amused to discover I blocked him years ago). Once Adam ventures beyond his apartment and the plot kicks into gear, his discovery involves a dead kid and an urban legend from the ‘90s, an early kind of viral sensation that is like a less imaginative version of The Ring. Adam learns the hard way that logging off is always a good solution, an unexpected disappointment since the film has us rooting for the ghost, not the hero.
Internet virality is not cinematic. It is impossible for a film to create the excitement of social media when hundreds if not thousands of accounts obsess over the same little thing in the same exact way and at the same exact time. In this sense, it is a fool’s errand for any film to use a viral thread as its source material. Two years ago, the film Zola sidestepped this concern since it was more about an unbelievable weekend, sort of like a Harmony Korine nightmare, while Adam’s thread was more about an immediate, claustrophobic connection to something that almost looked like real paranormal activity. We are used to films where a hapless loser deals with a ghost and makes a million bad choices, so what is novel is when said hapless loser engages with an online community about what he should do next. No film can replicate that kind of engagement, so instead of a new kind of horror film, here we have a derivative story that’s flavored by a stale idea of social media that has not existed for nearly a decade.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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