Dead Man’s Curve

Director: Dan Rosen
Screenwriters: Dan Rosen

Institute History

  • 1998 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Fact or urban myth? If your roommate in college commits suicide, you get an automatic 4.0 for the semester. But what if it just looks like a suicide? Either way, it’s a great premise for a suspense thriller. With admission to the Graduate School of Business at Harvard as the stakes, best friends Tim and Chris devise a plan to murder their roommate Rand and make it look like suicide. Everything seems to be going according to plan, at least at first. But as the police start questioning the facts and friends start questioning friends, their foolproof plan begins to unravel. The question remains: Just who is being set up?

Filled with up-to-the-minute popular-culture references, the keeps-you-guessing-until-the-very-end story line is a pleasure. Spoofing everything from silly college rituals to old suspense thrillers, Dead Man’s Curve turns the genre on its head. The tongue-in-cheek humor is delicately combined with a dark and twisted under-current that festers below the surface. Issues of privilege and class in East Coast colleges and testing the limits of true friendship are fodder for the plot.

Written and directed by Dan Rosen (who wrote The Last Supper), Dead Man’s Curve is a cheeky, tightly constructed film. Infused with sharply written, frequently sarcastic dialogue, the story flies along at a nonstop pace. Extremely well acted by the young and very handsome cast, this film is too much fun to miss.


Dan Rosen, Director
Dan Rosen was born in
Baltimore. He wrote The Last Supper, which premiered in the American Spectrum at Sundance in 1996. Dead Man’s Curve is his directing debut.

— Lisa Viola

Screening Details

As you use our Online Archives, please understand that the information presented from Festivals, Labs, and other activities is taken directly from official publications from each year. While this information is limited and doesn't necessarily represent the full list of participants (e.g. actors and crew), it is the list given to us by the main film/play/project contact at the time, based on the space restrictions of our publications. Each entry in the Online Archives is meant as a historical record of a particular film, play, or project at the time of its involvement with Sundance Institute. For this reason, we can only amend an entry if a name is misspelled, or if the entry does not correctly reflect the original publication. If you have questions or comments, please email [email protected]