‘My Dead Friend Zoe’ Will Make You Laugh at the Worst Things Imaginable
There are few surprises in My Dead Friend Zoe, co-writer and director Kyle Hausmann Stokes’ (and executive producer/football mega-star Travis Kelce’s) feature debut. What would be another film’s big twist or tearjerker moment is, after all, right there in the title. But what stirred the audience at its March 9 premiere at SXSW Film Festival was how the story of a grief-stricken woman running away from her problems—at the behest of the titular spectral bestie that continues to haunt her—imbued its familiar formula with a sense of earnestness and charm. It’s a film that could easily veer into manipulative territory in lesser hands, but Hausmann Stokes transforms this personal and devastating story into something deeper, sweeter, and funnier than it may initially seem.
Adapted from a short film inspired by Hausmann Stokes’ own experiences as a veteran having lost friends to suicide, Zoe tells the story of Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Zoe (Natalie Morales), fiercely close, Rihanna-loving, opposites-attract platoonmates—a friendship that we know from the start is doomed. The film shifts between flashbacks in Afghanistan, 2016, during Zoe and Merit’s service, and the present-day, where a stony-faced Merit seems to do little but run miles every day, attend therapy sessions, and stew in pained silence alone. Except that she’s never actually alone; memories of Zoe—and Zoe herself—continue to haunt her.
Merit sees Zoe everywhere she goes, a status quo that makes the film something of a ghost story. But Zoe is a funny, friendly ghost, offering biting commentary along the way: at group therapy sessions for fellow veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms, where Zoe’s mockery of other attendees’ stories discourages Merit from sharing her own; in Merit’s home, dissuading her from taking calls from her mom; and at the hospital to pick up her Alzheimer-stricken grandfather Dale (Ed Harris), bemusedly side-eyeing his lapses in memory.