Out of FrightFest, Stewart Sparke’s Dead Reset rises as a solid video game adaptation. Based on the 2025 game of the same name, the film brings the tone, style, and aesthetic to a time-loop journey in a similar vein to Tubi’s Kill Me Again (2025). Sparke, who co-wrote the script with Paul Butler, brings far more emotional currency and circumstantial urgency. In doing so, he drives the story off the cliff into precarious territory. While incorporating themes of human desperation, scientific advancements, and morality, Dead Reset is a slice of pure underwater entertainment with wicked practical effects and death sequences.
Surgeon Cole Mason (Daniel Thrace) wakes up inside a research facility where he’s tasked with performing surgery on a test subject. Her stomach pulses with an ungodly creature burrowed deep within her. His superior Magson (Adrina Carroll) demands compliance or his death. There is no in-between. The team is rounded out by the aggressive Slade (Dennis Rasaq), Fearne (Lyndsey Craine), and Cooper (Michaela Longden). Initially, Cole displays consternation about the mission, unsure whether anything Magson says is true. He dies over and over again. As you can imagine, he must convince Magson and her team that they have, in fact, lived through the surgery countless times before.
But as Cole spirals down Magson’s diabolical plan, he learns that he must team up with Fearne and fight back. Slade and Cooper eventually come around to his way of thinking, but it might be too late to save them. Sparke and Butler deliver strong stakes for their characters, with Thrace digging his fingernails into the dirt and uncovering surprising layers to Cole and his excavation of self and willpower. The style, courtesy of cinematographer Hamish Saks, gets down and dirty, dousing the screen with real grit. The visual storytelling punctuates the emotional propulsion embedded within the narrative. And it never feels overwrought or purposeless. Sparke calculates every move with precision.
Dead Reset feels akin to William Eubank’s 2020 film Underwater, starring Kristen Stewart. The one-location suffocates even the viewer, as the walls push up against the characters. It’s a claustrophobic and disastrous expedition that mines the state of humanity, the relentless desire to play God, and what it means to question authority. While the limited setting is certainly due to budgetary constraints, it allows the filmmaking team to find ambition in unlikely places and stretch the talents of Thrace and his fellow cast members. It’s driven by character-heavy dialogue with explosive bits of mayhem thrown in for good measure.
Stewart Sparke’s Dead Reset operates as a deep-sea excursion that asks the audience to consider mankind’s place within the greater scope of the universe. The time-loop aspect mirrors the video game’s save points, but it’s an organic component that never detracts from the flow and pacing of the story. Dead Reset proves that having a micro-budget frequently results in daring creativity and promise.
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