3 Short Paragraphs: Here Alone

2016, Rod Blackhurst (Alone Time [short]) -- download

I didn't realize, until I began to recall this movie for the writeup, that it sunk rather thoroughly into my psyche. For the past few months since I watched it, I have had a recurring half-awake morning dream. In it, I am living alone in an Airstream trailer near the shoreline of the Bras D'or lakes where I grew up. Its an isolated spot, always shrouded in mist, in a rural area where few lived, even before a zombie apocalypse depopulated it. Its not so much a zombie dream, as it is a living entirely alone dream, a hermitage kept tense by the ever present chance of either the murderous walking dead, or other people who may want what you have. This movie was all about that mood.

Ann lives alone in the woods, after escaping the fast-zombie-probably-not-undead plague that has destroyed the world. She escaped with her husband and infant son, but they are not around. Key the memories of those tragic events. She scavenges from surrounding homes, through the woods under the fence and across the fields, but not before covering herself in filth (her own filth) to mask her living human scent. This is one of those indie introspective movies, something my own story vignettes always seem to degrade into, less about the zombies than it is about a woman alone with her loss. It is interrupted, as it has to be, by her bumping into a man and his teenage step-daughter and making the choice to hide & protect them.

The Road set the stage for all further post-apocalyptic movies about isolation and loss. In much the way this one sunk into my own brain, there is something in ever social humans, that must always consider what it would be like to be forced to live alone. The poignant bit that this movie tries to make, is that it is sometimes harder to choose to return to the world... well, what is left of the world. Ann lost everything that was dear to her, but that shouldn't force her to end her life. The problem is that while the point of the movie is very apparent, it isn't presented well enough for us to really care. But it was a decent effort, that atmospherically captures the idea if the acting and plot couldn't.