As this highly derivative but mildly absorbing Canadian horror thriller kicks off, we meet Ethan (Douglas Smith), a young man seemingly on the verge of killing himself. He looks out over a picturesque stretch of Saskatchewan landscape bathed in magic-hour glow before we cut to a welter of confusing, often blood-soaked flashbacks (or flashforwards) – and his voiceover then explains that although his memory doesn’t work so well, he’d rather not remember most of his life anyway. That’s because unfortunate Ethan is suffering from a kind of cyclical amnesia, not unlike the disorder that bedevilled Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, which compels him to keep reintroducing himself to people he’s met many times before. This is a particularly dangerous condition to have because Ethan is living in the middle of a zombie apocalypse that’s turned everyone who hasn’t gone full zombie into skittish, trigger-happy survivalists desperately clinging to what little resources they have.
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Writer-director Lowell Dean (Wolfcop) takes his time slotting the narrative puzzle pieces into place with minute reveals, which is frustrating because genre-savvy viewers are likely to have guessed it all after 20 minutes. That makes it a little bit harder to feel much empathy for doltish Ethan as he struggles to work it all out, but at least his dimness, a condition not entirely unrelated to his memory struggles, is grounded in the story itself.
- Die Alone is on digital platforms from 10 March.