Buoyed by the spotlight The Whale and Stranger Things gives her, Sadie Sink has ventured, almost immediately, into leading roles of her own. More than deserved considering the credible turns she has given in both, but Dear Zoe will do little for her or director Gren Wells. Eight years on from the debut of the latter in the directing chair comes a definitively cautious movie that plays with grief and the emotions of an audience easily hooked by the tragic premise. One of the grand issues for Dear Zoe to mount is the split and divide between those who have noted the immediate, poor writing and those that will suffer through to feel flush and supportive of an actor they are obsessed with.
Neither is a reason to watch Dear Zoe, a particularly mechanical feature that has the “ordinary girl with ordinary problems” explanation tipped on its head by tragedy. Continually noting that turn upside down instead of actually showing the effect of it, Dear Zoe wraps itself in grief and does little to push through with it. Calling it repulsive would be rude to the quality Sink does portray here, but that is no surprise for a performer that has somehow managed to come out of a feature that presents 9/11 coinciding with the death of Tess DeNunzio’s (Sink) sister, relatively unscathed. Why Dear Zoe feels it has the narrative muscles to comment on those that died outside of 9/11, as though a national tragedy was a bit mean to those that passed elsewhere in the country, is fascinatingly brain-dead.
It takes some mental gymnastics to make that link-up stick but it is an absolute overhaul of hard work from Sink that makes her performance, not the dialogue, but her presence as a lead character, acceptable. Glum faces line the sofa of a therapist’s office and it soon withers from there. Theo Rossi marks another unconvincing piece for the camera and the whiny teenage back and forth between Nick and Tess is unbearable. Consequence-free dialogue that feels jilted and staged between characters that should have that informal, familial relationship feel to be complete strangers. All of that, every moment of it from the weak opening interactions to the reconciliation that is inevitably on the horizon, is the fault of the writing. It is nearly impossible to give much weight to an absolute colossal waste of time.
Nearly. Sink survives this absolute car crash of a movie and the insensitivity that is right at the core of this feature is as intense as it is unhinged. To take the lacking tenderness and dry relationships seriously is to suspend belief and to align a thought process with that of 9/11 cancelling out all other tragedies that struck that day. Dear Zoe is horrendous not in its offence but in thinking it has some remarkable point to make with such a comment. As though everyone was glued to the screen and forgot everything else for a moment, including their loved ones. Dear Zoe presents the horrific death of a child as the equivalent of forgetting about boiling a pot of pasta, distracting itself with real footage of a horrible day in American history. What a quaint backdrop for a movie about selfish grief.
