Even the best of best friends can be a drag at times, especially imaginary friends like the title character in writer-director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’s feature debut, My Dead Friend Zoe. As ably played by Natalie Morales (Grey’s Anatomy, The Middleman), Zoe can be the best of friends and the worst of friends. She’s the former when she’s doubling up as emotional support for Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green, Star Trek: Discovery, The Walking Undead), an Afghanistan War veteran struggling to readjust to life back in the States (Oregon, to be exact). The debilitating PTSD she brought back from Afghanistan remains, like Zoe, a constant companion.
Zoe falls into the second category when she refuses to take a hint, hangs around all the time, and sardonically critiques Merit’s life choices and/or the people around Merit. Even well-meaning ones like Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman), the leader of a support group Merit attends only because the alternative, possible jail time for a work-related incident, isn’t particularly palatable. Not surprisingly, Merit repeatedly refuses to open up to Cole or the other members of the group, often with Zoe’s tacit support, leaving her in an unstable mental and emotional state.
When Merit’s mother, Kris (Gloria Reuben), reaches out, it’s less to check in on Merit’s mental health and more because she needs Merit’s help with the latter’s grandfather, Dale (Ed Harris). The old man is a retired Army Lt. Colonel living by himself in a lakeside cabin in rural Oregon. Fiercely independent but slowed down by age and the early onset of Alzheimer’s, Dale finds what’s left of his life, like the memories of his recently deceased wife and Merit’s grandmother, gradually slipping away. A nearby assisted living facility promises reasonable care at reasonable prices, but for Dale, it’s the equivalent of a death sentence. He won’t, like so many others before him (or since) go quietly into the good night.
An Army and combat veteran who served during the Iraq War, Hausmann-Stokes clearly understands the subject matter, specifically the myriad difficulties faced by returning combat veterans, both first-hand through personal experience and second-hand through the experiences of other combat veterans. Bringing that deep well of knowledge and experience to a feature-length film, while not a given, certainly counts as a plus. The settings, characters, and their interactions feel authentic and genuine in their expression of grief, loss, and reconciling themselves with their pasts.
Narratively, Hausmann-Stokes takes an occasionally abrupt, sometimes jagged, non-linear approach to Merit and Zoe’s story, switching between scenes of Merit and the still-alive Zoe in Afghanistan (an early scene hilariously shows them bonding to Rihanna’s “Umbrella” while sitting in an unused Humvee), Merit’s struggles to overcome PTSD (among other issues, all of them personified by the imaginary Zoe) and the heartrending choices surrounding Dale’s future. All events, past and present, move inexorably forward, the former culminating with Zoe’s death, the latter with Dale’s care decision and Merit’s reconciliation with her past.
Driven by Zoe’s premature death, Merit’s possible role in Zoe’s death, and Zoe’s constant ghostly presence wherever Merit goes, Merit’s permanent state of denial functions as an obvious narrative and character-based obstacle, albeit an internal one. Merit’s stubborn refusal to get the mental help she needs and do the necessary work on herself limits her ability to connect meaningfully with Dale, the grandfather she worshipped long ago and whose service in the Army she hoped to duplicate, if not imitate, and her emotionally distant mother.
Merit’s seemingly intractable refusal to address her mental health issues, in part fuelled by her desire to keep Zoe in her life even as an imaginary projection of her subconscious, can often lead to repetitive, redundant scenes. While far from fatal, those repetitive, redundant scenes threaten to undermine Hausmann-Stokes’s attempt to remind audiences, many of whom have already put both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in their individual and collective rear-view mirrors, of the real human cost involved when Americans are sent into combat zones overseas and the care they’re due when they return home.
My Dead Friend Zoe opened theatrically on Friday, February 28, via Briarcliff Entertainment.
