Dead reset

There is something almost perversely appropriate about transforming Dead Reset from an interactive FMV game into a conventional feature film. Originally released in 2025 as a choice-driven experience containing more than 300 filmed sequences, several branching routes and four principal endings, the project was reshaped into a 98-minute linear cut presented at FrightFest in 2026. What disappears in the transition is obviously the player's ability to decide who lives, who dies and which spectacularly bad decision Cole Mason should make next. What remains, however, reveals just how enthusiastically director Stewart Sparke and co-writer Paul Butler constructed their material as a blood-soaked science-fiction B-movie in the first place. The result sits somewhere between claustrophobic creature feature, temporal puzzle and unapologetic midnight movie: an imperfect but enormously spirited production that understands that sometimes the most memorable horror is the kind willing to cover its actors in blood, throw a practical monster into the room and see what happens.

The opening wastes little time establishing the nightmare. Former surgeon Cole Mason awakens inside an isolated underwater research facility with no memory of how he arrived there and very little opportunity to ask questions. A gun is pointed at him, an unconscious woman is waiting on an operating table, and he is ordered to perform a procedure that rapidly abandons anything resembling conventional medicine. Inside his patient's abdomen is a parasitic organism, its tentacles wrapped around her internal organs, and extracting it proves considerably more complicated than removing an appendix. Then everything goes catastrophically wrong. Cole dies — and wakes up again. The ingenious hook of Dead Reset is that death is not the conclusion of a scene but part of its narrative grammar. Cole is caught within a temporal displacement experiment that sends him backwards whenever he is killed, retaining memories that everyone around him lacks. What initially looks like a particularly nasty variation on Alien consequently mutates into something closer to Edge of Tomorrow by way of an old-fashioned splatter movie, with each death becoming another gruesome piece of information.

Removing the interactive choices could easily have exposed the artificial architecture underneath the original game, yet the linear version works surprisingly well because repetition is already embedded in the story. The question is no longer "What would I choose?" but "What will Cole understand this time?" Stewart Sparke keeps the resets moving quickly enough that they rarely feel like simple repetitions, gradually altering our perception of conversations, alliances and apparently insignificant details. There is also a deliciously macabre running joke in watching a protagonist acquire useful knowledge by repeatedly experiencing the worst day — and frequently the worst death — imaginable. The mechanism recalls the pleasure of watching horror films with friends and insisting that you would never open that door, enter that corridor or trust that suspicious scientist. Dead Reset effectively answers that boast by giving Cole multiple opportunities to improve his survival instincts, only for the universe to discover increasingly unpleasant methods of correcting him.

At the centre of all this controlled chaos is Daniel Thrace, whose performance gives the film considerably more stability than its deliberately pulpy surroundings might suggest. Playing confusion once is relatively easy; playing variations of confusion, terror, recognition, exhaustion and growing certainty while returning to variations of the same circumstances is a much more peculiar acting challenge. Daniel Thrace understands that Cole cannot emotionally reset simply because the world does. The accumulating fatigue in his performance becomes essential to selling the concept. Around him, Lyndsey Craine, Dennis Rasaq, Andrina Carroll, Michaela Longden, Elle O’Hara, Andrew Dunn, Johnny Vivash and Daniel Bruce embrace a heightened register appropriate to the material. Some performances occasionally drift towards theatrical exaggeration, but strangely that becomes part of the film's personality rather than a fatal weakness. These are characters trapped in an environment where scientists protect experiments at appalling human cost, armed men solve disagreements with bullets and something profoundly unpleasant may emerge from a body at any moment. Under those circumstances, understatement was probably never going to survive very long.

Where Dead Reset earns much of its affection is in its determination to remain tactile. In an era when inexpensive genre productions can be tempted to solve every impossible problem digitally, Stewart Sparke and his team lean heavily into physical sets, prosthetics and practical gore. The results do not always disguise the limitations of the production, but that is almost beside the point. There is texture here: blood looks sticky, wounds have weight and the creature occupies the same physical space as the performers. The occasional rough edge evokes the gloriously handmade monsters of VHS-era creature features and, at moments, the charmingly visible ingenuity of pre-digital Doctor Who. Hamish Saks photographs the industrial interiors with enough oppressive darkness to make the research facility feel simultaneously substantial and labyrinthine, while Emma Spinola's music helps maintain momentum between bursts of violence. Rather than trying to impersonate a $100-million studio production, Dead Reset understands the resources it has and turns their limitations into part of its aesthetic.

That approach is particularly effective because Stewart Sparke never appears embarrassed by the film he is making. Dead Reset knows exactly where it belongs on the genre spectrum. Its DNA contains echoes of Alien, The Thing, Lovecraftian body horror and the death-loop mechanics popularised across modern science fiction, but the film's personality comes from recombining familiar ingredients with the enthusiasm of filmmakers who clearly enjoy getting their hands dirty. There is even something nostalgically appealing about its construction. Anyone who remembers the FMV boom of the 1990s — when titles such as Phantasmagoria promised that cinema and videogames were finally about to collide — may recognise that particular thrill of watching real performers inhabit a world that feels simultaneously cinematic and game-like. Ironically, the FrightFest cut completes the circle: a videogame designed to resemble an interactive horror film has become an actual horror film. The choices are gone, but traces of them remain visible in the narrative's rhythm, almost like phantom limbs.

The limitations are equally apparent. Without player agency, certain relationships and character developments can feel compressed, while the original branching structure occasionally leaves fingerprints on transitions that were designed to accommodate alternative possibilities. The mythology is serviceable rather than revolutionary, and viewers familiar with time-loop fiction will probably anticipate several of its mechanisms long before Cole does. Yet judging Dead Reset exclusively by narrative novelty would miss much of its appeal. This is a film powered less by revelation than by execution, particularly the escalating pleasure of seeing how its filmmakers will stage the next confrontation, mutation or death. There is a refreshing lack of cynicism in that approach. The gore is plentiful without becoming oppressively nasty, the humour generally emerges from the absurdity of the situation rather than demolishing the stakes, and the 98-minute running time prevents the central gimmick from exhausting itself. Like the best B-movies, it understands that sincerity and ridiculousness are perfectly capable of sharing the same operating table.

Dead Reset ultimately succeeds because its roughness and ambition are inseparable. Stewart Sparke and Paul Butler have taken material conceived around audience participation and discovered a surprisingly entertaining conventional creature feature hiding inside it. It cannot completely reproduce the mischievous pleasure of choosing Cole's actions and discovering whether your brilliant survival strategy gets him rescued or horribly dismembered, but the cinematic version compensates with pace, practical craftsmanship and a cast willing to commit wholeheartedly to increasingly outrageous circumstances. Daniel Thrace provides the necessary human anchor while the prosthetics, gallons of stage blood and deliberately old-school monster-movie sensibility provide the fun. This is not polished prestige science fiction, nor does it pretend to be. It is sweaty, claustrophobic, occasionally cheesy and proudly gruesome — precisely the sort of film that feels at home with a late-night festival audience reacting collectively to every fresh disaster. Death may keep pressing the reset button, but Dead Reset has enough personality to make us happy to go around again.

Dead Reset
Directed by Stewart Sparke
Written by Paul Butler, Stewart Sparke
Produced by Paul Butler, Stewart Sparke
Executive produced by Dr David Banner MBE, Richard Pring
Starring: Daniel Thrace, Lyndsey Craine, Dennis Rasaq, Andrina Carroll, Michaela Longden, Elle O’Hara, Andrew Dunn, Johnny Vivash, Daniel Bruce
Cinematography: Hamish Saks
Edited by NC
Music by Emma Spinola
Production companies: Dark Rift Horror, Wales Interactive, avec le soutien de Media Cymru
Distributed by: NC
Release dates: NC
Running time: 98 minutes

Viewed on August 27, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)