Hooptober 12.0 – Die Alone (2024)

Being Film #31 for Hooptober 2025

I don’t remember exactly what they say about the best laid plans, but of course after finishing last night’s movie and looking at my list I realized I still needed 1) a Canadian film, and 2) a post-apocalyptic film. And I really didn’t want to watch Bird Box, so instead here we are with Die Alone, a small but well executed chamber piece about a young man with memory problems searching for his girlfriend in a world where a virus has wiped out most of humanity, leaving insatiable, plant-based zombies hungry for human flesh. Yeah, I know…there’s another really famous show and video game with a similar setting (if not premise). This is still worth it.

THE QUICK SUMMARY: Ethan has a hard time remembering…there was an accident, and he has amnesia. Which is a bad thing because he doesn’t remember that the world has been hit with a virus that causes plants to reanimate the dead, living the remnants of humanity fighting off seemingly immortal zombies. One thing he does remember is Emma, his girlfriend he was leaving with and now desperately wants to find. When he meets Mae, a woman living on her own in the woods, she takes him in and helps him on his search. Trouble is, Mae’s hiding secrets, secrets Ethan will soon discover involve him and this world in a much deeper way than he could ever expect…

Writer/director Lowell Dean makes the most of his locations and a great cast, including Carrie-Anne Moss and Frank Grillo in a small, late role. The movie plays with time, leaving both Ethan and you as the viewer confused as to what has happened and when. We know there was a crash, where Ethan wakes up. We know he has a cast on his arm, and that at some point he didn’t. But something more seems off, as if the time between Ethan’s bouts of memory loss and the reality of linear time don’t line up, come close and fracture in weird ways.

We’re not working with a lot of money here, and so Die Alone more than other films relies heavily on its players to carry the sense of a crumbling world and the horrors that now inhabit it. And man, like always Carrie-Anne Moss delivers. Watching the film again after knowing the “twist” (there’s always a twist) you can see all the little ways she plays into the truth of the movie. It helps that she’s playing against a great lead in Douglas Smith as the confused but determined Ethan. A few other characters flow in and out of the story, but the thrust of the story centers around the two of them.

Maybe the ending is obvious, especially in light of the film’s opening scene. But Die Alone works the way it does because of Ebert’s Law: it’s not what a film is about, but how it goes about it. And as a last minute surprise edition to the 12th annual Hooptober, it’s a perfect example of the kind of finds a marathon like this offers: small, passionate, and creative.

Exactly the kind of film I like to discover. Happy Halloween, y’all.