Every genre, sub-genre, and micro-genre eventually exhausts itself.
But genres typically don't end; they expand, they evolve, and adapt, drawing on new ideas from outside the genre, mixing elements from other genres, and ultimately resurrect themselves, reborn on the ashes of the old. Someone, somewhere, is thinking far too much about the current state of the undead sub-genre.
Fresh, bold, new ideas are what the exhausted zombie/undead sub-genre desperately needs. Instead, longtime fans of the sub-genre George Romero reinvented in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead have been subjected to the never-ending Walking Dead spin-offs and the occasional standalone straight-to-streaming, straight-to-the-memory-hole entry made on a micro-budget and D-level actors.
Writer-director Lowell Dean (the Wolf Cop series) provides more than a few in his latest film, Die Alone, a fascinatingly ruminative take on the sub-genre set in the aftermath of a viral outbreak and the end of industrial civilization and the social, political, and cultural order.
Die Alone opens in bracing fashion as Ethan (Douglas Smith), a seemingly lone survivor of the zombie apocalypse, contemplates ending what's left of his life before Dean smartly hits the rewind button. As Ethan suffers from debilitating headaches and worse, short- and long-term memory loss, he rarely knows what day, week, or even year it is. He's driven, however, by a desire to find his longtime girlfriend, Emma (Kimberly-Sue Murray), an ER doctor who fled the nearest, unnamed city with Ethan for the family cabin when the tide turned against its non-zombie inhabitants.
When Ethan shudders himself awake from one of his many stupors, he's met with two unfriendly men bearing firearms in a truck and a survivalist, Mae (Carrie-Anne Moss, The Matrix quadrilogy, Memento), who, for reasons left unanswered until the final moments, decides to save Ethan from certain death. Instead, she and Ethan return to the farm she's made her home for the better part of two or three (or more) decades, tends his wounds, and feeds him, apparently happy for the company, however temporary.
Overwhelmingly, stubbornly driven by his desire to find Emma, who Ethan claims he lost after a near-fatal car accident left him with a permanently impaired memory, he temporarily leaves Mae behind and ventures to an adjacent farm. He doesn't find Emma, but he does find an older woman, Jolene (Amy Matysio), and her teen son, as scared of him as they would any stranger in a post-legal order world.
Ethan also begins to discover -- not for the first time and not the last, given his recurring memory problems -- the contours of this post-apocalyptic world: a plant-based virus has turned most of humanity into plant-zombie hybrids. They still crave human flesh for sustenance, but they're not as easily dispatched (head shots only slow them down).
As Ethan's memories slowly return, he begins to realize that knowledge, however worthwhile on its own, isn't always as desirable as not knowing (or forgetting), setting up one of Die Alone's central themes and questions: to become the undead in Die Alone means to move closer to nature ("reclaimed" as someone puts it in the film). Reclamation also means the death of the individual and the emergence of something else, possibly new in its place, possibly more attuned to nature and the environment than the city- or town-dwelling non-hybrid humans.
Although Die Alone suffers from severe mid-film longueurs, it picks up again with the introduction of home invaders with a not-so-secret agenda and later still, a god-fearing family led by Kai (Frank Grillo in an extended cameo) and the answers posed in the first moments, specifically how and why Ethan, despite his memory problems (or possibly because of them), seemingly chooses an act of self-annihilation over self-preservation.
Dramatically and emotionally, the answers are more than satisfying, though it's hard to overlook the budget limitations that give us too brief a glimpse of the post-apocalyptic world outside Mae's farm or the plant-human hybrid undead shown in just a few, too-short scenes.
Die Alone is available as of today on various Video On Demand platforms via Quiver Distribution.