deadCenter opener ‘Hailey’s Game’ conjures deep, human magic

Suppose I were to tell you about a film where a grieving, psychologically fractured woman accidentally resurrects her long-dead love in a séance gone wrong. In that case, you might understandably expect a kind of supernatural horror or moody, neo-gothic romance.

But in “Hailey’s Game,” – a brand new, locally produced indie selected as one of the Opening Night features of 2024’s deadCenter Film Festival – that exact back-from-the-dead scenario is used to simply set up a surprisingly grounded, human story of love, loss, and letting go.

It’s an unexpected little movie in nearly every element, from the near-complete disregard for rules or heady explanations about its central resurrection to the playful, turn-on-a-dime tonal shifts between 20-somethings comedy and heartwrenching romantic drama to the powerful, remarkable lead performance of local Abby Bryan.

It would be difficult to compare “Hailey’s Game” easily to another film. It inherits much of its DNA from 90s indies, microbudget comedies, and hushed, festival-darling melodramas, but its driving magical-realism heart is something pretty rarely seen in those outlets. 

Once it’s clear that “Hailey’s Game” is committed to being a small, bare-bones, purely character-driven affair, the fun for the viewer becomes all about seeing how it can juggle its strange and impossible development without betraying its own genuine, human ethos.

And impressively, it never does.

The story never tries to go big. It never bothers boring you with long-winded explanations or unearned stakes. It remains, again, human and believable right up through its closing moments, when its statements and arcing themes of connection and closure more fully reveal themselves.

None of which would ever work, of course, without a cast that’s able to pull it off.

film
Katie Hightower directing cast and crew on the set of “Hailey’s Game”

With just six credited performances, the movie’s little troupe rises to the challenge, with supporters Francisco De Los Santos, David Greyson, and Kat Metcalfe all ably carrying much of the comedic relief against the demanding drama of Christian Stroup and Kayleigh Adams as the titular Hailey.

But the entire film arguably rests on the shoulders of Abby Bryan as Carter, the long-grieving, depression-wrestling former lover and possible soulmate of Hailey’s that stands at the center of the story.

Bryan’s delivery, and her emotional realism in the face of all the weirdness and confusion around her, is unfaltering and, admittedly, far beyond what you might expect from this kind of hyper-local, minimalist indie offering.

It’s her performance, and the way that the camera gradually makes its way closer in order to capture its depth and intimacy, that ground the story and keep it on its emotional rails.

Following an advanced screening of “Hailey’s Game,” I sat down with writer/director Katie Hightower to talk about the film’s making and the decidedly non-supernatural approach, but also what it means to be selected as a deadCenter opening feature and whether this movie was made with a deadCenter premiere in mind.

“So it just kind of worked out that way as far as timeline was concerned,” she said. “deadCenter just happened to be the first festival that was going to show when we finished the film.”

film
Katie Hightower directing David Greyson on the set of “Hailey’s Game at The Floating Bookshop in OKC’s West Village

Even though a home city premiere was just a happy coincidence, it was a no-brainer that they’d be sending this decidedly Oklahoman film to the most important Oklahoman showcase.

“It’s 100% Oklahoman hands that made this film,” Hightower said. “So of course we knew we wanted to submit to our hometown festival.”

She admits that the conception and development of “Hailey’s Game” never really gave much thought to tailoring the story or the presentation to festival appeal, and actually didn’t even begin life as a feature film at all.

When she was writing the initial script, “Hailey’s Game” was meant to be a new season of a bite-sized, episodic webseries of the same name that Hightower and her team had produced in earlier years. But as the story and its emotional core began taking shape, it became something that could easily stand on its own.

“It’s been really evolutionarily,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of moments in creating this film where we’ve looked at it and said ‘oh, this is something special, and actually something more special than we thought it was going to be. We should probably take this a little bit more seriously.’”

film
Kayleigh Adams and Abby Bryan with cast and crew on the set of “Hailey’s Game”

Even in further developing the story and its ideas, however, Hightower said that she never considered digging too deeply into supernatural minutiae or letting the rules and strictures of its magical elements overshadow the emotions and the audience’s own personal connections. 

“One thing that’s really important to me is the autonomy of being able to decide what the world is,” she told me. “I really enjoy when a story doesn’t fully sketch it out for me and lets me play and be creative as a viewer. That’s really why we don’t play by any specific set of rules. I want you to make your own.”

Making their own rules has clearly worked out for Hightower and her team.

Even in the face of uncertainties, insecurities, and past festival rejections, they made “Hailey’s Game” into exactly the film that they wanted, and that commitment has paid off with the validation of being selected as an official Opening Night feature at deadCenter 2024.

It’ll be Hightower’s first screening ever at the film festival.

“Just to have this finished product and to know that it’s a movie that I would want to watch, there’s a level of success and happiness that I can just take from that,” she said. “It hasn’t been an easy journey. It’s been filled with some really hard, really ugly lessons at times, so now we can just take all that in and sit in the success and say ‘whatever happens from here, it doesn’t matter, because we made this.’”

“Hailey’s Game” screens on Opening Night of deadCenter 2024, June 6th, at 5:00 pm at Harkins Theatres in Bricktown.

For more information, including the full 2024 festival schedule, visit deadcenterfilm.org.


Author Profile

Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.