Drop Dead to world premiere at Oldenburg Film Festival
Ned Crawley's horror-comedy Drop Dead will have its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival after a late addition to the official selection, The Hollywood Reporter reported on Sept. 15.
The festival, described as Germany's leading independent film festival, stages its 33rd edition from Sept. 16 to 20. The timing puts the first screening inside opening week. A world premiere means no public audience has seen the film anywhere before. An official selection means festival programmers have chosen it to represent the event.
Drop Dead starts simply. Eight strangers board a freight elevator. The doors close and they cannot get out. They are trapped in a life-and-death predicament. Slowly they learn they are linked inside what is described as a sinister, supernatural or biblical nightmare.
The lift is small. The cast is stuck. Crawley said he made the film within the confines of a locked, claustrophobic 15-foot steel box, driven by the performances of relatively unknown actors. A single-location shoot keeps the camera and the audience in one tight space.
The ensemble includes Melissa Neal, Daniel Adeosun, Victor Rivera, Christina Tam, Alexandra Kate, Roger Ajogbe, John O'Mahony and Elijah Craft. The names will be fresh to most viewers. That is part of the plan, with the tension carried by the group rather than one established star.
The film follows Crawley's 2025 supernatural Western Killing Faith. That film starred Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise and Bill Pullman. It later reached No. 2 on HBO Max's worldwide movie charts, and hit No. 1 in several territories including Argentina and Brazil.
Killing Faith also found an early champion. Author Stephen King reviewed it on X after its Beyond Fest premiere, calling it "a quasi-supernatural Western that has echoes of Cormac McCarthy." He later ranked it as one of his favourite films of the year.
Drop Dead is Crawley's third feature as a director. His debut was the 2016 crime comedy Middle Man, starring Jim O'Heir, Andrew J. West and Josh McDermitt. His second was Killing Faith.
For festival audiences, this means Oldenburg gets the first look. The elevator doors open there first.
