Screen history repeats itself, as Carrie-Anne Moss is once again paired with an amnesia victim (Douglas Smith) searching for answers in Die Alone, a Canadian post-apocalypse drama crawling with a verdant variety of zombies that have gone to seed.
Writer-director Lowell Dean makes sensible use of Saskatchewan’s panoramic grasslands to anchor the action, following a few hardy survivors stumbling through a barren landscape largely stripped of humanity thanks to a plant-based virus that’s amped up the vegetation to lethal levels.
Ethan (Smith) and Emma (Kimberly Sue Miller) are a young couple on the run when the environmental shit hits the fan. Despite making a plan to meetup at a remote cabin in case they get separated, Ethan’s trauma-induced amnesia keeps getting in the way, and the two predictably lose track of each other.
Luckily clueless Ethan gets rescued by rugged survivalist May (Moss), who agrees to help him locate his lost love and provide reasonable room and board in exchange for farm labor.
Instead of gratitude, Ethan steals May’s truck and goes off to search for Emma on his own, but the absent-minded protagonist requires frequent rescuing. That means many scenes begin with Ethan regaining consciousness in different locations, usually covered in blood, sweat, and ears.
The zombie community is represented by hungry humanoids that have been reclaimed by the earth, each with its own distinctive look fusing foliage and fashion. The makeup department deserves the donuts for creating such intriguing new creatures.
Strangely, Dean mostly employs the undead as set dressing, rather than as a serious threat, limiting their fright potential to a precious few moments.
But it’s not a dealbreaker.
That Die Alone succeeds as a movie is largely due to the unbreakable strength of its central relationships and the filmmaker’s fully developed arsenal of appreciation for those that came before him.
Cinema nerds will eagerly recognize shots paying tribute to everyone from John Ford to Terrence Malick to Sam Raimi. Dean’s script, though maddeningly fractured and episodic, leads to a crushing finale that I’m still chewing on like old Milk Duds.
Be like the cows. Keep chewing. It’s making more sense all the time.
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