Series / Dead Still

The Cast of Dead Still

In Victorian Dublin Brock Blennerhasset, played by Michael Smiley is a “memorial photographer”; he poses dead people, with their eyes open, to sit for a portrait before they’re buried. Very quickly Blennerhasset, on the insistence of his niece Nancy (played by Eileen O’Higgins), takes on assistant Conall Molloy, played by Kerr Logan. This is timely as Dublin Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Regan (Aidan O’Hare) is called to a murder scene where the victim is posed like a subject of one of Blennerhasset’s portraits.

Dead Still is a six-part Irish-Canadian television drama series, which premiered on May 18, 2020, on Acorn TV and on May 15, 2020 Citytv. The series is a co-production between Ireland's Deadpan Pictures and Canada's Shaftesbury Films.

---

This series provides examples of:

A-M

• Ancient Conspiracy: The killer is being employed by a secret society that has their hands in a lot of different conspiracies. Blennerhasset says they named themselves ("The Hellfire Club") after a "myth society" from a century ago, and then it's hinted that they are the society from a century ago.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Subverted slightly, The Blennerhasset family is mean and sniping to each other and to Molloy. Nancy's brother has some seriously dark secrets, but Brock's brother and sister while verbally vicious are not evil.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: The Hellfire club send notes like this to remain anonymous.
• Kissing Under the Influence: Nancy and Molloy while drugged by a Phony Psychic begin to kiss after several episodes of romantic tension.
• Madwoman in the Attic: In the second episode, the team photographs a dead child. It seems like the dead boy is haunting the house at first but, it turns out his twin brother is autistic and their parents have been keeping him locked up in the "nursery" at the top of the house.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In the episode "Camera Obscura" Molloy is invited to photograph spirits at a séance. The medium seems to actually conjure the dead as the spirit knows things that could not be known by a phony psychic. But, the characters all start to hallucinate spectral things because they are drugged.

N-Z

• Phony Psychic: Eva Lambert pretends to be a medium, but she and her sister Aline are drugging their customers so they will hallucinate the dead spirits.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: Blennerhasset has a notable Anglo-Irish accent as a member of the upper-middle class. Police detective Regan has a notable Leeside accent as he is from Cork. In episode three Blennerhasset presumes a lot of stereotypes about the policeman saying "Of course well you are a man from Cork."
• Take Me Instead: Brock offers himself up to the killer in exchange for his niece Nancy, who is being held captive, to save her life.
• The Killer Was Left-Handed: Police Detective Regan has been trying, and failing, to convince the other police detectives of the serial killer. The chief inspector finally believes him when Regan and the medical examiner prove one victim was left-handed but he was killed by a right-handed killer.
• The Nondescript: The killer is someone Nancy knew when she was younger but when she meets them again as an adult she does not remember having met him before. She says later when he asks why she did not remember him: "You are unremarkable."
• Serial Killer: The storylines are episodic, but there is a serial storyline of a serial killer whose victims are posed like the subject of one of Blennerhasset’s portraits.
• Spooky Séance: In the episode "Camera Obscura" Molloy is invited to photograph spirits at a séance. The characters are made to sit around the table and hold hands with a "spirit queen" medium. The medium seems to actually conjure the dead as the spirit knows things that could not be known by a phony psychic. But, the characters all start to hallucinate spectral things because they are drugged.