Metacritic reviews

You can’t fault an attempt to transform a viral sensation into the next bonkers realization of contemporary horror that exploits our ever-volatile online climate—but you can always fault a genre film that doesn’t do the chosen genre justice.

Dear David tries its best to scare, but it never quite brings the spookiness it promises. It suffers from trying to do a bit too much with the living characters and not enough with the dead ones. Also, way too much lens flare.

This low-rent, no-energy, seen-it-all-before genre wank left me absolutely terrified of returning to an era when micro-blogged cries for help could last for half a year and run the length of a novella.

Dear David is branded content—uninspired and hollow to a fault—and perhaps that’s even more disturbing than a five-year-old internet ghost story.

So if you’re in search of a new horror film to watch in the countdown to Halloween this October, look elsewhere—no need to go exploring this particular noise in your streaming pool.

it is a boring paint-by-numbers ghost movie, a jumble of tropes borrowed from movies like “The Ring,” and a poor facsimile of its influences.