Rave critical reviews. A fan-driven crowdfunding investment model. Set and shot in my beloved home state of Oregon. I was kicking myself for months that I couldn’t get around to My Dead Friend Zoe in the brief time it was in theaters, and I knew I had to cover this as soon as it hit DVD.
Turns out that was the right call. It’s a good movie, to be sure, but I doubt that seeing it on the big screen would’ve made it much better.
To start with, CONTENT WARNING. While the film is purportedly “inspired by” true events, that’s kind of a white lie. In truth, debut writer/director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes pulled heavily from his time as an army paratrooper in the Iraq War, and dedicated the film to a couple of his platoonmates who are sadly no longer with us. As such, fair warning that this movie deals heavily with themes of war, PTSD, mental illness, death, grief, suicide, etc.
This is the story of Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), an army engineer who served in Iraq. She served alongside the eponymous Zoe (Natalie Morales), two best friends keeping each other sane and protecting each other in a sexist hellhole military camp. We catch up with Merit sometime after she’s discharged, and a workplace accident has her in legal trouble. Thus Merit is stuck with court-appointed group therapy sessions led by a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War (Dr. Cole, played by Morgan Freeman).
Unfortunately, Merit’s having problems with her group therapy sessions. In fact, she’s having problems with a lot of her everyday life. Because Zoe is still there. She’s dead, but Merit still sees Zoe and talks to her on a constant basis.
It’s open to interpretation as to whether Zoe is literally haunting Merit, or whether Zoe is just a chronic hallucination. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Zoe is an asshole. She gives the worst possible advice at any given time and she consistently makes Merit feel like shit. Even when she was alive, Zoe was a brash loudmouth who refused to discuss life after the army or even entertain such a notion.
Put simply, Zoe is a transparent metaphor for PTSD. She’s a psychological scar, a perpetual and inescapable reminder of something so awful that Merit can’t discuss it. Merit can’t even bring herself to look directly at it or think directly about it — the best she can do is kind of look at it out of the corner of her eye before her mind starts to break down. Even under threat of criminal convictions and possible jail time, even in the company of family members and fellow veterans (and even a family member who is a veteran, more on him later), she cannot bring herself to think about or talk about what happened to Zoe and the part she played in it.
In life, Zoe was a woman so focused on life in the military that she couldn’t or wouldn’t make a civilian life for herself. In death, Zoe is a perpetual reminder of what Merit lost, and Merit can’t or won’t let her go. Put simply, what we’ve got here are two women compelled to keep living in the past, despite all the crushing pressure to keep moving forward.
Which brings us to Merit’s family situation.
Ed Harris plays Dale, Merit’s grandfather and personal hero. Back in the Vietnam era, he served 22 years in the army and retired a lieutenant colonel. Cut to the present day, when he’s mourning his recently deceased wife and living in a lake house with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Naturally, this leads to mounting pressure from Dale’s daughter (Merit’s mother, played by Gloria Reuben) to move him into a retirement home and sell the lake house. While that’s going on, Merit gets guilt-tripped into visiting the lake house to look after her grandpa, who of course doesn’t claim to want or need anyone’s help.
What we’ve got with Dale is kind of a “Ghost of Christmas Future” scenario. In many ways, he embodies the worst-case scenario of what Merit could grow up to be if she keeps on bottling up her trauma and living in the past without letting anyone in. This is further compounded by Merit holding onto memories of the hero she always thought her grandfather was, because it hurts so much more to see the broken-down old shitkicker he’s aging into.
Rounding out the cast is Alex, played by Utkarsh Ambudkar. He’s a potential love interest for Merit while also providing some welcome comic relief. Alex works at the local retirement home, which inevitably leads to complications when we finally cross that particular bridge in the climax. More importantly, as Alex is the child of an immigrant family and Merit is a black female army vet, the two of them have some intriguing viewpoints and discussions regarding America and life therein. I need hardly add that Alex is a civilian who works in the healthcare industry, and he seems like a genuinely sweet non-judgmental guy who couldn’t be in any position to hurt Merit in any way. As such, he provides a new potential angle for Merit to try and open up about the skeletons burrowing a hole in her closet.
Admittedly, the movie takes a while to really get going. I don’t like it when characters refuse to do the sensible and obvious thing when they have every reason to, and it tries my patience when the audience is stuck waiting for the characters to catch up with what we already know and expect. But in this particular case, that’s kind of the point.
This is clearly and explicitly a film about mental illness and PTSD. No matter how obvious the solution is, it still requires Merit to directly face the deepest and darkest parts of herself, acknowledging all the fears and flaws that she has to perpetually deny simply to function in everyday life. She can find the strength to keep it all bottled up until the strain finally wears her down, or she can find the strength to rip off the bandage and start putting some actual stitches in. Either way, this takes a kind of courage that Merit never learned about in basic training.
And anyway, I was genuinely impressed how the film kept building up in one direction, only for the big reveal to take a last-moment swerve in another direction altogether. Major kudos for pulling that off so well.
At one point in the group therapy sessions, a character points out that he lost more veteran comrades in civilian life than he ever did on the battlefield. Based on the “true events” that inspired this movie, I get the impression that this was supposed to be the most important takeaway. Thus the film serves as a clear-eyed examination of how war tends to follow the soldiers home, with collateral damage that nobody acknowledges or discusses because of how tough and depressing it is.
My Dead Friend Zoe is exactly the kind of smaller and more intimate film that’s better suited for home viewing than it ever was on the big screen. I need hardly add that the difficult subject matter is easier to swallow for viewers who can take the film at their own pace. That said, there’s plenty of charm and comic relief to take the edge off the traumatic subject matter without diminishing the weight or importance of the topic. It certainly helps that we’ve got Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris on hand to provide the necessary gravitas, with Sonequa Martin-Green’s dynamic starring turn to anchor the film. Though I have to wonder if Natalie Morales was the right choice for her particular role — I worry that she might’ve made her character just a little too much of an asshole.
This movie doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, and I’m not quite convinced yet that it’s best-of-year material, but it’s a solid little character dramedy that’s definitely worth checking out.