DEAR DAVID - Mark Reviews Movies

Dear David, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 12, 2023

There's almost certainly a rational explanation for the alleged haunting experienced by Adam Ellis, an artist who chronicled some strange happenings in his apartment and elsewhere on social media. The posts, as well as some "news" articles on a popular website, went viral, with people chiming in with advice, some possible background information, and doubt about what was happening to him, and now, here's Dear David, a movie adaptation of the experience that attempts to dig into some cultural and personal issues but is mostly just a string of cheap jump scares.

The big question, of course, is whether or not Ellis' purported haunting was real. Let's assume it was to him, and Mike Van Waes' screenplay does occasionally suggest underlying issues and complications that could very well explain away visions of ghosts, terrors in the night, and seemingly uncharacteristic acts done without any memory of having performed them. What's ultimately galling about the movie is that it ultimately dismisses all of those elements, even and especially when they contradict the possibility that the spirit of a dead boy is exerting some influence on and over our main character.

The movie announces that it's based on things that actually happened, and from Ellis' perspective, sure, that's true in some way. However, Van Waes and director John McPhail, though, don't seem to care about any form of truth, either objective or subjective, because their goal is just to tell a ghost story, and the movie's downfall is that it does so in a shallow, unconvincing, and predictable way.

A prologue establishes the boy, obviously named David (Cameron Nicoll), and his obsession with a burgeoning internet during the 1990s. He's bullied online by some anonymous people, and after that, well, the screenplay is a bit hazy on the kid's back story. Somehow, the kid's ghost infects the worldwide web, leading to some online forums and accounts with the name "Dear David." A couple of teens in another sort-of prologue tease and taunt one of those handles, leading to one of them to have a phantom arm shoved down his throat in the middle of the night.

In case it isn't clear, one of the themes here is a warning about using anonymity and the impersonal realm of the internet to intentionally insult or harm others online, and fine, that's a nice enough lesson theoretically, although it's mostly lost here amidst the broad strokes of a story. It revolves around Adam (Augustus Prew), a cartoonist for BuzzFeed in 2017, and it's only necessary to mention the publication because so much of the movie, made in part by the media company's movie production company, serves as advertising for the brand. It's strange to watch a movie that attempts to be authentic about technology and the internet restrict its portrayal of the online world to one specific brand and bunch of off-brand rip-offs of other services.

Anyway, Adam, who has had problems with sleep paralysis in the past and ongoing issues with getting close to people, starts to think that David's ghost, who scolds him on a non-specific microblogging platform for saying something mean to someone else being mean, is haunting him. In the night and stuck between dream and waking, he sees the figure of a child, missing a chunk of his head, sitting in a rocking chair. Adam's cats meow and hiss at something invisible to him, and he starts waking up with bruises and other injuries after being attacked by this phantom for real or in his dreams.

There's little else to the story, apart from intimacy issues with Adam's boyfriend Kyle (René Escobar Jr.) and some self-obsession issues on the protagonist's part. The whole movie is gradually leading toward Adam coming to terms with or recognizing those things, while also making it increasingly obvious that it believes Dear David is a real threat and the bearer of a scared-straight message about online etiquette. It's a jumble of conflicting ideas, though, that doesn't work as a tale of personal discovery, because the supernatural elements are so prevalent and focused on, or as much of a horror story, because the entire plot arrives its supernatural conclusion before it even establishes what the rules and stakes are.

That basically means the structure and methods of Dear David amount to a bunch of slightly creepy but mostly isolated scare scenes that implement all the usual tricks—mostly things or figures jumping into or suddenly appearing in frame, accompanied by loud musical stings. It's almost impossible to accept this as anything close to a real story, in other words, when it just seems like it comes from a generic horror movie—because that's all this is, really.

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