Die Alone, 2024.

Written and directed by Lowell Dean.

Starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Douglas Smith, and Frank Grillo.

Lost in a world reclaimed by nature and overrun by mysterious creatures, a young man with amnesia teams up with an eccentric survivalist to find his missing girlfriend.

Lowell Dean’s biological horror Die Alone takes the well-worn tropes of the zombie apocalypse genre and injects them with just enough originality to stand out. What starts as a familiar post-pandemic survival story, with echoes of The Last of Us and Memento, soon twists into something more introspective.

Douglas Smith plays Ethan, a man suffering from a debilitating case of amnesia, waking each day with no memory of the one before. He is caught in a world ravaged by a plant-based virus that turns humans into grotesque, moss-covered husks.

Ethan’s only connection to the past is the memories of his missing girlfriend Emma (Kimberley-Sue Murray), whom he believes is still alive somewhere beyond the barren Saskatchewan plains. His survival depends on the help of Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss), a hardened loner with secrets of her own.

Moss, who knows a thing or two about unreliable memories (having starred in Memento), plays Mae with a controlled steeliness. Her role as protector, caretaker, and perhaps something more, adds an emotional weight that grounds the film’s more outlandish elements. At first, she seems like the archetypal apocalypse survivor, resourceful but isolated. But as Ethan’s recollection flickers back in fragments, it becomes clear that the relationship between these two is far more complicated.