Much like "Marley was dead, to begin with" in A Christmas Carol's opening line, Zoe (Natalie Morales) is deceased right as My Dear Friend Zoe begins. Whereas Jacob Marley was a cruel plague on society, though, Zoe was an upbeat soul with a lot of life ahead of her, a snarky personality, and endless enthusiasm for belting out Rihanna songs. She was also in the U.S. Army, where she befriended Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green). Losing Zoe has left Merit adrift and struggling to even comprehend how to express her feelings. Not even a kindly group therapy session leader name Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman) can lure Merit out of her shell.
Merit’s court-mandated appearances in those group sessions halt once her grandfather and Vietnam vet Dale (Ed Harris) suddenly needs help. This cantankerous man is struggling with early signs of Alzheimer's. This situation makes it impossible for him to continue living at his longtime luxurious lakeside abode. Dealing with this under normal circumstances would be tremendously hard. However, the bottled-up Merit can't escape her vision of Zoe. Inside this woman’s head, her best friend’s still around, though now she’s often suggesting Merit isolate herself from others or that Merit isn’t as strong as she thinks she is. So much is swirling around Merit’s psyche. You can’t keep all that tightly contained forever.
Writer/director/U.S. Army veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes (who wrote Zoe's script with A.J. Bermudez) ends My Dead Friend Zoe with on-screen text and archival footage revealing that the movie is based on two fellow veterans and dear friends of his. These men lost their lives to the mental health struggles Merit grapples with throughout the runtime. Real-world urgency informs the empathetic and respectful air Hausmann-Stokes brings to My Dead Friend Zoe. Unfortunately, translating these qualities into a very conventional three-act narrative film doesn’t quite work.
My Dead Friend Zoe tries compacting heavy and messy material into a feature that doesn’t alienate mainstream audiences. Any strife between Merit and Dale, for instance, gets resolved almost as quickly as it’s introduced. Grand displays of aggression from the latter character could’ve instilled interesting long-term conflict throughout Zoe. Instead, these bursts of conflict immediately dissipate. The dialogue also keeps evoking that cringeworthy “oppression Olympics” scene from Ginny & Georgia. Dale has a big monologue where he talks about how being a Vietnam veteran was far more challenging than being an Iraq War vet, for instance. A flashback to Merit and Zoe overseas, meanwhile, has the duo comparing which of the two has it tougher (in terms of marginalized identities and class) in America.
In these sequences, Merit, Zoe, and Dale don’t exude any idiosyncratic personalities. Their verbiage doesn’t vary much from one character to another. They instead just recite vague ruminations on humanity that could’ve come from widely shared Facebook posts. As lines that let us in deeper into these characters, though, they don’t work. Nor do they flourish as commentary on American society. We know what separates these characters, but not what drives them as people. They're just mouthpieces for quasi-relevant internet terminology like "snowflakes". Evoking Ian Malcolm in the second half of the Jurassic Park novel becoming a megaphone for Michael Crichton’s pontifications on the world is never a good sign for a screenplay.
Distinctive visuals used to realize Merit’s interior struggles, meanwhile, are few and far between. A motif of lights flickering whenever Merit’s comes close to talking about Zoe’s passing is the most prominent way imagery reflects what a nightmare this woman’s head is. This is My Dead Friend Zoe’s greatest shortcoming. Other features like The Messenger have used precise editing and blocking to offer a window into fractured veteran psyches. Hausmann-Stokes, cinematographer Matt Sakatani Roe, and editor Ali Greer, meanwhile, lend this feature a flat, generic look that doesn’t vividly parallel Merit’s headspace. Like the rigid dialogue too obsessed with hackneyed generational differences, this filmmaking approach creates a barrier between audiences and My Dead Friend Zoe’s storylines. When the visuals are so uninvolving, why should audiences get invested in the characters?
In its visuals and story structure, My Dead Friend Zoe tries packing messy, jagged material into a very conventional box. The dissonance produces a motion picture that never reaches its full potential. Thankfully, the actors pick up some of the slack. In one of her first feature film lead roles, Sonequa Martin-Green solidly portrays Merit as someone whose constant suppression of mental health turmoil can't keep flickers of that pain from trickling out. She also has commendable lived-in chemistry with Ed Harris, who lends Dale far more specificity than what's on the page.
The real standout of the cast is easily the multi-layered work of Natalie Morales as Zoe. To portray Merit's internalized version of post-death Zoe, Morales simultaneously inhabits an idealized vision of a best friend and a physical manifestation of Merit's self-critical tendencies. This vision of Zoe is someone Merit can loudly sing along to tunes in the cars with. However, she also constantly advises Merit to ignore phone calls from loved ones or not create new connections with others. This mixture of darkness and light is a nuanced fusion that Morales effortlessly inhabits. Whenever Zoe pops up on-screen, Morales ensures the viewer’s never quite sure whether relief or tension is on the way.
Low-key sequences centered on Martin-Green and Morales also demonstrate the two actors sharing some lovely chemistry. However, the pair are let down by My Dead Friend Zoe’s clumsy dialogue. These two performers could excel just by trading naturalistic lines rather than being forced to spew didactic expository dialogue. In this indie feature, the cast and weighty material are willing, but the visuals and screenwriting are weak.