My Dead Friend Zoe (2025)

By: Mike Ward on Friday, March 07

R Running Time: 103 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

  • A surprisingly powerful and insightful drama, with a healthy amount of humor, My Dead Friend Zoe is a unique film that leaves a powerful impression on a viewer.

  • Sonequa Martin-Green leads a strong cast, with great performances from Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, and a soft-spoken Morgan Freeman.

  • Honest and intentional about the impact on PTSD and trauma, using elements of real-life military experience to guide us through a moving story about a friend struggling to come to terms with varying degrees of loss in her life.

NO

  • For some, the “dead friend” approach to the film plays as bad taste, or feels unnecessary in the greater conversation the film is trying to have.

  • Because it leaves a lot of vanity aside, My Dead Friend Zoe can feel a little lacking in terms of a well-rounded film.

  • The film’s tonal shifts may be jarring for some viewers.


OUR REVIEW

The premise of My Dead Friend Zoe threatens to undermine itself: Army veteran Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) spends every day talking to her best friend, Zoe (Natalie Morales). As the film title tells us, Zoe is dead. Merit “hanging out” with her is little more than a coping mechanism she uses to try to reconcile the loss of someone she important and close to her.

Writer/director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ film begins as something of a buddy comedy, with Zoe playing the “wise-cracking best friend.” Eventually, a significant pivot takes place and the film finds strong emotional heft in examining the scars left behind from PTSD, trauma, and how our experiences can directly define our reaction and response to difficult moments we face in life.

Hausmann-Stokes, a Bronze Star Medal recipient who served in the Iraq War, finds a realness here. Merit seems increasingly comfortable having Zoe around, though her therapist (Morgan Freeman) cannot quite seem to determine why Merit seems so walled off, reserved, and dispirited with life in general.

My Dead Friend Zoe should not work. And yet, Hausmann-Stokes, working with co-writers A.J. Bermudez and Cherish Chen, create a unique and clever exploration of mental health challenges and overall physical decline. Merit is not only reeling from the loss of her best friend, but we see her grandfather (Ed Harris) in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s - a condition he is fighting hard to keep at bay, but something clearly starting to gain a tighter and tighter grip on the retired Army vet.

Despite its weighty themes, there are moments of levity and inspiration. Exchanges between Merit and Zoe are full of sarcasm and cynicism and are often humorous in nature. It is their connection which makes the separations these characters face even more powerful in the second half of the film. As Merit, Martin-Green’s performance is powerful, a multi-layered journey of realization, acceptance, and grief. As Zoe, Morales finds an almost menacing quality the longer she hangs around.

At first, I didn’t quite know how to react to My Dead Friend Zoe. However, the longer it goes, and the more patient you are watching it, the emotional elements of the story take hold and are hard to dismiss.

By the time the movie had ended, I wanted to connect with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in a while. I thought a lot about my brother - a military veteran who died when I was 5 years old. I missed my parents, both no longer living. And I realized that sometimes we hold on to people we have lost as a remembrance of what was and what we wish we might have again someday.

And in that context, My Dead Friend Zoe leaves a blistering impact.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Sonequa Martin-Green, Natalie Morales, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Gloria Reuben, Utkarsh Ambudkar

Director: Kyle Hausmann-Stokes
Written by: Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, A.J. Bermudez (screenplay), Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, Cherish Chen (story)
Release Date: February 28, 2025
Briarcliff Entertainment