The Coen brothers meet the Chemical Brothers in this 2024 thriller about a Midwestern music enthusiast (John Fleck) who kidnaps a talented synthesiser engineer (Sterling Macer Jr.). They should have called it Herbie Handcuffs.

1980s nostalgia is such a plague that you can’t throw a VHS tape at a horror festival without hitting seven or eight films set in the decade that taste forgot, but Dead Mail is not interested in playing the ’80s hits, nor in going down the torture-porn route of so many kidnapping thrillers. This unique movie puts its paper money where its mouth is by not merely having a synth score, but by making synthesisers part of the plot, and the results are often electric.

From the opening scenes at an Illinois post office, where we meet dead letter investigator Jasper (Tomas Boykin), it is clear this is not Misery business as usual. At the men’s home where Jasper is living, he meets the mild-mannered Trent, then the film flashes back to Trent meeting keyboard technician Josh at a synthesiser convention. The non-linear structure gives the simple story a quiet intrigue, yet can’t help feeling uneven, particularly when the narrative switches to Jasper’s underwritten female colleagues (Micki Jackson and Susan Priver) in the third act.

There is nothing synthetic however about the ’80s setting, from the poppy colours and grainy cinematography to the fetishistic attention to period detail and analogue technology. But that authentic style is all at the service of a story about lonely men with so much to offer each other, but ultimately failing to connect. Rejected by society they retreat into music and making stuff, and the movie treats its interesting if underdeveloped characters with sympathy, as tender as the teriyaki chicken that Trent lovingly prepares for his imprisoned protégé.

Those splashes of Midwestern quirkiness keep Dead Mail on the right side of downbeat, but the deadpan delivery and discordant mood envelops you in its saturated sine waves, allowing the latent racial and homosexual undertones to settle under the skin. The outcome is Fargo meets Psycho (by way of Stephen King), with its anxious accidental crime and constantly shifting protagonists. And while it may be patchy, Dead Mail delivers some surprising frequencies.