Augustus Prew (“Pure Genius,” “Midnight Kiss,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) stars as Adam Ellis, and the film incorporates his life as a former Buzzfeed employee in addition to the ghost story. Ellis makes the mistake of breaking the cardinal rule of someone working in an online space by reading comments and responding to some internet trolls. That’s when a mysterious user named Dear David calls him. Soon after, Ellis begins to suffer from sleep paralysis and notices that the empty rocking chair in his apartment has begun to move on its own. As he documents the increasingly inexplicable activities taking place in his apartment, he begins to believe that David is the ghost of a dead child intentionally haunting him.
“Dear David” was written by Mike Van Waes (“The Crooked Man,” untitled “Leprechaun”) and directed by John McPhail (“Anna and the Apocalypse”). I really don’t want to chase a movie that hasn’t been released yet, especially when studios try to delegitimize the work of writers and actors in the midst of the double whammy, but the original “Dear David” thread was creepy. freak. Watching it unfold felt like a communal urban legend in real time, but this trailer feels like a paint-by-numbers ghost story fed through Buzzfeed’s SEO algorithm. I hope there’s more than meets the eye in this one, but if not, we’ll always have the original story.
“Dear David” opens on October 13, 2023, in theaters and digitally.