My Dead Friend Zoe – Glasgow Film Festival 2025 Review

Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) is struggling to reintegrate into civilian life after serving a tour in Afghanistan. No one understands her except her best friend Zoe, whom she served alongside – the problem is, her best friend Zoe is dead. With her friendly spectre in tow, Merit goes to look after her beloved grandfather Dale (Ed Harris), a fellow army veteran, who has started to show early signs of Alzheimer’s. Though neither of them are any good at talking about their feelings, their time together helps both of them share traumas they’d buried.

My Dead Friend Zoe is directed and co-written by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, who based the story on his own experiences with two men in his platoon when he was in the army. He gender-flipped the characters to allow for some distancing, an understandable move considering the rawness and intensity of the emotions involved. Adding further realism is that the other members of the group therapy Merit (sporadically) attends are all based on real veterans – their pictures are seen over the closing credits.

As Merit goes about her civilian life, and tries to look after her grandpa the best she can, we get flashes back from her time in Afghanistan, whilst Zoe was still alive. We learn that Zoe was scared about the end of the war, and what her life would look like back home. Basically, she was institutionalised. Although we are told early (in fact, in the movie’s title), that she will die, we don’t learn how until right at the end of the film – we’re led to assume one thing, and the actual answer comes as a surprise. In a less heartfelt venture, treating a cause of death as a twist ending could have come off as a little bit tasteless, but we learn enough about the circumstances that it still doesn’t feel as if it came out of nowhere.

That My Dead Friend Zoe was made with such feeling makes it easier to not be too hard on some of its worst impulses, like frequently clichéd dialogue. Morgan Freeman’s group therapy leader gets the worst deal there; “We all have demons Merit, but you don’t have to face them alone” is a typical example. This tendency towards cliché, and a flirtation with becoming military propaganda, are two issues that never quite dominate the movie’s stronger points, but neither do they ever leave the scene entirely.

On the subject of strong points, however – the strongest of all here is the performance of Sonequa Martin-Green. Best known for her roles in The Walking Dead and Star Trek: Discovery, Martin-Green hasn’t made much of a movie career yet, but her performance in My Dead Friend Zoe should change that. In a role that had the potential for a lot of capital A acting, she underplays at every turn, subtly but commandingly suggesting a raging inner turmoil. Her scenes of quiet kinship with Ed Harris (on typically fine form) are the highlights of the movie.