My Dead Friend Zoe Review: Honor Isn’t Enough

My Dead Friend Zoe tells an important story about veterans and mental health struggles, but in a truncated, frustrating manner.

Director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes dedicated this film to two people that he served in the military with (and paid tribute to them in the end credits) and that should not go unspoken, as it is an admirable method of honoring them. The film follows Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), a veteran who served in Afghanistan. It opens in a promising way, introducing her both in a group therapy session with Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman) and simultaneously talking to, you guessed it, her best friend, Zoe (Natalie Morales), with whom she served. The scenes featuring Freeman and Martin-Green (and Morales, in a parallel fashion) are truly the heart of the film. Hausmann-Stokes manages to create a feeling of realism in the therapy sessions without losing the sense of reality for characters who served in the military. The choice to feature actual servicemembers is both inspired and honorable.

That being said, the film goes quickly off the rails. Put simply, there are too many plotlines stuffed into 98 minutes of runtime. Yes, people’s lives are full and complex. But when these lives are represented on screen, there is a very tentative balance. A number of missteps occur, and at a rapid pace. Merit has several flashbacks designed to mislead about Zoe’s death that serve more as an annoyance than an engaging mystery. We are introduced to Merit’s mother (Gloria Reuben) and her grandfather (Ed Harris), who is struggling with memory issues while living alone at his lakehouse. The audience is also forced to endure a meet-cute with Alex (Utkarsh Ambudkar) who, of course, runs the assisted living facility close by to the lakehouse. My Dead Friend Zoe is a movie full of contrivances and a mishmash of genres that doesn’t fully engage in any of them.

The film is interesting because, besides the romance, most of the plotlines work, but they never work together. The details of the relationship between Merit and her grandfather could easily be its own entire movie. Unsurprisingly, Harris plays the gruff, frustrated veteran well, but that is just the beginning of his character’s journey. He truly shines when he and Merit have a real, frank discussion about the differences between the experiences of Vietnam and Afghanistan veterans, both in how they were treated by the public and their experiences with mental health services at the Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals. Harris has always had a particular gift for softening his countenance with his eyes, a subtle change belying that hardened exterior and immediately leading us to lean in and listen.

The “mystery” of Zoe’s ending is not predictable, but it is also not particularly interesting. The consistent use of a certain prop to trigger these flashback moments is a flash of intelligence in the script (written by Hausmann-Stokes, Cherish Chen, and A.J. Bermudez) but the short moments before immediately returning to the present day end up doing a disservice to the reveal near the end of the film. By the time we arrive at this moment, it falls flatter than it should, despite very strong turns from both Martin-Green and Morales. Much like the previous plotline, if the focus had been solely on this story (with moments of therapy to guide it), this would have hit like a punch to the gut instead of relief that the story had been finally wrapped up.

My Dead Friend Zoe tells an important story about veterans and mental health struggles, but in a truncated, frustrating manner. The director (and co-writer) was obviously inspired by real-life experiences, but the decision to expand this into a familial struggle and a romance truly sinks it before it can really get going. It is important to honor our veterans who struggle with mental health issues, but that doesn’t change the fact that this version is imbalanced and out of touch with tone throughout the runtime.

My Dead Friend Zoe will be released in US theatres on February 28, 2025. In the UK, the film will be screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on the same day.