This odd. existential indie comedy is like Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) if Randall was a slacker layabout and Hopkirk suffered from crippling abandonment issues. Its interesting paranormal concept carries this marmite mumblecore some distance, but aside from some amusingly melancholy discourse on the nature of loneliness, its meandering narrative is too threadbare to really connect.

Clay (director Clay Tatum) is an unmotivated photographer who is looking forward to a lazy weekend when his more industrious wife (Whitney Weir) leaves on a business trip. His plans are interrupted when he bumps into Whit (Whitmer Thomas), an old acquaintance. Whit seems oddly surprised that Clay can actually see him. It turns out that Whit is dead and Clay is the first person to register his presence. Irritated but feeling sorry for the literal lost soul, Clay takes Whit home to hang out, but it’s clear the lonely ghost doesn’t want to let his lifeline to the corporeal world go.

Most of the humour of The Civil Dead lies in its complete mundanity. There are no indications of Whit’s incorporeality beyond the odd demonstration that no one can see him apart from Clay. He’s also unable to interact with anything; he can’t open doors or pick anything up. This adds the existential sting to The Civil Dead‘s already fairly melancholy atmosphere. Clay becomes Whit’s only point of direct interaction with the world. But Whit is also more than a little clingy, and Clay is solidly misanthropic. It’s a fractious dynamic, and Clay’s existing mean edge only gets keener the longer he’s in Whit’s presence. The resulting moments of comedy, often buried unobtrusively in deceptively throwaway dialogue, is given that extra dimension of cruelty.

Once that dynamic has been established, The Civil Dead simply wears out its premise a little too quickly. Once it edges past the 90 minute mark we start to understand how Whit’s warped perception of time feels. The film settles in a repetitive purgatorial loop of Whit’s desperation for connection pushing Clay away. There’s some milage in the irony that Clay is not the type of person most people would be drawn to, but it eventually stops being a catalyst for humour and simply becomes unpleasant. Since its release to festivals last year, this quietly abrasive approach has actually struck a chord with many, and it’s clear that previous collaborators Tatum and Thomas know how to play to each other as performers. It simply gets wedged in a particular furrow and finds itself with nowhere to go other than a direction that ultimately leaves an aftertaste that is even more astringent than its general tone.

Available in select cinemas and On-demand from Fri 19 Jan 2024