The Oldenburg Film Festival has made a late edition to its line-up, adding Ned Crawley‘s Drop Dead to its official selection. The film will have its world premiere at Oldenburg, Germany’s leading indie film fest.
The high-concept horror thriller, according to the movie’s publicity material, follows a group of eight strangers who „board a freight elevatorn and find themselves trapped in an ever-worsening life-and-death predicament that ultimately reveals they are all linked together in a sinister, supernatural, or even biblical nightmare.”
The low-budget feature is Crawley’s follow up to his supernatural Western Killing Faith (2025) starring Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise, and Bill Pullman, which has been a major streaming success, reaching number 2 on HBO Max’s worldwide movie charts and hitting number one in several territories, including Argentina and Brazil.
Killing Faith got a boost from fan Stephen King, who, shortly after its premiere at Beyond Fest, posted a review on X, calling it “a quasi-supernatural Western that has echoes of Cormac McCarthy.” King ranked it as one of his favorite films of the year.
For Drop Dead, Crawley said he decided to shift away from “sweeping landscapes and A-list actors” to “create something equally compelling within the confines of a locked, claustrophobic 15 foot steel box, driven by the performances of relatively unknown actors.”
The film features an ensemble cast including Melissa Neal, Daniel Adeosun, Victor Rivera, Christina Tam, Alexandra kate, Roger Ajogbe, John O’Mahony, and Elijah Craft.
Drop Dead is Crawley’s third feature as a director after Killing Faith and his 2016 debut Middle Man, a crime comedy starring Jim O’Heir, Andrew J. West, and Josh McDermitt.
The 33rd Oldenburg International Film Festival runs Sept. 16-20.
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