Reviewed by Alicia Glass
In a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombie-like creatures, a young man with amnesia searches desperately for his missing girlfriend.
Right from the beginning when we meet our dubious narrator, the world has already gone straight to hell. A very green plant-like hell that infects humans and turns them into zombie monsters, but leaves the land behind more or less lush, and very empty. And Ethan (Douglas Smith), our unreliable narrator, while suffering from amnesia that strikes repeatedly at the most inopportune moments, is on the search for his missing girlfriend Emma (Kimberly-Sue Murray).
Ethan just has this terrible tendency to black out pretty much whenever he does anything physically strenuous or gets hungry, and since these things happen a lot in our sh*t-show of an end-world, he passes out fairly often too, much to his chagrin. After combing empty streets looking for Emma and getting fired upon by some Mad Max-like others, Ethan is saved by the advent of a scar-laden survivalist who calls herself Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss).
Memories are tricky, unreliable things in this killer green world, and while Ethan can remember snippets of his escape from the city with his physician girlfriend Emma and the car crash that had her disappear and him end up with a cast on his arm, much else is lost. In the beginning, Mae is gruff and blunt and tells Ethan very little, but dutifully takes him back to her crumbling house with the skeletal zombie Myrtle stuck in the weeds next to the barn serving as a warning system, and does her best to take care of him.
Mae herself is ambiguous, a mashup like Sarah Connor both before and after meeting the Terminator, quite capable of executing zombies without batting an eyelash, but also unbearably lonely, wanting Ethan to dance with her to “Crimson and Clover” playing on the old record-player. The more we see Mae trying to help Ethan with whatever mess he’s gotten himself into this time, every time he drops and wakes and Mae reintroduces herself as, “My name is Mae,” to him yet again, we feel more for the scar-laden warrioress whose heart lies bleeding for her forgetful charge.
We do eventually meet others in this killer verdant world, as Tom (Jonathon Cherry) and his band of thief survivors descend on the farmhouse, intent on hunting down what happened to Tom’s lady Frannie. And towards the end of the film, the story behind the original owners of the farmhouse Mae now occupies, bible-thumping Kai (Frank Grillo) and his family, including his little rifle-toting cutie daughter Caroline (Palmer Tastad), gets splattered across Ethan’s memory in the most horrific fashion possible. But to give literally anything else away would do the film a great disservice and be total spoilers, so Moxie will not.
Suffice to say that the revelations that attack Ethan at the end of the film, a bit more romantical than your standard Saw cluex4 montage but still filled with shocking deaths and truth bombshells, have had clues to them sprinkled throughout literally the entire movie. And if you pay attention to the little things, the vines that twine together to form branches that strangle and kill, you will be right there on the edge of dark enlightenment with poor Ethan, and Mae too.
Check for bite marks and greenery in your sleeves, in Die Alone, available for Digital Download, DVD and Blu-ray from Lightbulb Films on Monday, March 10th, 2025!