Aug 14: Stoughton Village Players continue summer series with ‘Dead Weight’

I’m really digging Stoughton Village Players’ summer film series. Last month, they screened Michael Neelsen’s enthralling Brett Favre documentary, and they’re following that up with a much less somber, much more depressing feature — well, for all but the most zealous of Packer fans at least.

Dead Weight finds Charlie (Joe Belknap) trying to reunite with his girlfriend Samantha (Mary Lindberg) in the aftermath of a devastating viral outbreak. Zombies have taken the pop cultural zeitgeist hostage to an embarrassing degree, but the details of Dead Weight’s pandemic are intentionally vague. Bloodied corpses tease the possibility of the undead, but co-directors and Oshkosh natives Adam Bartlett and John Pata understand their lean context only allows more room for what makes post-apocalyptic stories work: human relationships.

Doggedly low on thrill-seeking, Dead Weight uses its economical staging and minimal special effects to privilege humanity and its importance in a world now bereft of it. Early on, Charlie and his group of survivors raid an abandoned house for supplies and canned soups (yum, vegetable medley), and an argument breaks out over whether staying is worth the risk of being attacked by whatever’s making the upstairs floorboards creak. Bartlett and Pata never show you what’s got everyone so spooked, centering a very tense moment around the reactions of the uninfected. A devastated population is also heightened by reverse jumps in time, highlighting the highs and lows of Charlie and Samantha’s relationship as the temporal shifts both ground the stakes and provide a jigsaw puzzle backstory to sift through.

Screening in tandem with Samuel Karow and Drew Britton’s excellent short film “Marshland,” Dead Weight comes to Stoughton after playing various local circuits including the Madison Horror Film Festival (2012) and more recently, the Zombillies Film Fest this past March.

• Dead Weight plays tonight at 7:30p at the Stoughton Village Players Theater on 255 E. Main St. Bartlett and Pata will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion. Tickets are $5.