A young man with short-term memory loss tries to survive the zombie apocalypse while searching for his girlfriend in Die Alone, now available on VOD streaming services. Writer-director Lowell Dean (Wolfcop) adds a dash of Christopher Nolan‘s Memento to the usual zombie movie trappings, and comes out with a winner that offers some real surprises along the way.
Die Alone stars Douglas Smith (Big Love) as Ethan, who wakes up at the wheel of a totaled pickup in the film’s opening scene. He has vague memories of girlfriend Emma (Kimberly-Sue Murray), news reports of an impending apocalypse, and plans to relocate to a cabin in the woods… but the deserted world he finds himself in seems well into the apocalypse. You’d like to think that’s something you would remember.
But before Ethan can be offed by a gang of roving raiders, the mysterious Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss) comes to his rescue, and invites the kid back to her place for a hot meal. When Ethan steals her car to search for Emma in the middle of the night, and comes to again at the wheel of a stalled vehicle, we realize something isn’t quite right with him.
Like Memento’s Leonard Shelby, Ethan seems to have anterograde amnesia—something that Mae explains after coming to his rescue once again. This isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation, and Ethan’s short-term memory loss isn’t a great survival trait during a zombie apocalypse. But when a mysterious drifter (Jonathan Cherry) stumbles across Ethan and Mae’s cabin, a bigger picture starts to become clear.
We’ve seen hundreds of zombies in movies and TV over the past two decades in the wake of the popularity of The Walking Dead, and most fail to be distinctive. But Die Alone manages to bring a unique perspective to its creature design: most of the undead glimpsed in the film are long past their expiration date and have merged with their environment, with the living corpses sprouting moss, flowers, or even trees. One zombie in Mae’s back yard has even rotted away to a living skeleton.
The creature design in Die Alone is so great that it’s a shame we don’t get to spend more time with the zombies. But filmmaker Dean knows that despite the genre trappings, there’s more going on in his story than the world that contains it. The final act of his movie delivers a twisted 1-2 punch that reframes the film on both narrative and thematic levels, and works shockingly well.
Smith is an engaging lead presence as the perpetually-confused Ethan, who starts off on the same page as the audience but slowly falls behind as we learn more and more about the world that he continually forgets. But Moss, in a rare lead performance, steals the film as Mae, a complex character whose mystery is slowly worn away over the course of Die Alone. Frank Grillo appears in a brief but resonant role during the film’s third act.
Die Alone is best appreciated without knowing much about its story; even for veteran horror fans, the third act offers some genuine surprises. This one was dropped on streaming services without much fanfare this Halloween season, but in a sea of formulaic zombie films, it’s a gem that truly breaks the mold and deserves to find an audience.