Here Alone

This quietly effective post-apocalyptic story goes beyond zombie thriller tropes to contemplate if people living with trauma aren't better off on their own.

I'm a sucker for zombie stories and post-apocalyptic tales, and "Here Alone" combines both of those elements. Lucy Walters plays Ann, a young survivalist who has spent years camping in the woods on the outskirts of nowhere, foraging for food and avoiding all human contact.

There are plenty of tense moments, chases, battles, worries about becoming infected yourself, and all the other usual tropes of pop culture zombie artifacts like "The Walking Dead." And I enjoyed those.

But the movie, directed by Rod Blackhurst ("Amanda Knox") from a script by David Ebeltoft, goes further and deeper. It's a languid, contemplative film for its first half, reminding me very much of "Cast Away" and other stories of solitude. I'm not sure if Ann speaks a single word, other than in flashbacks showing us what happened to her in the before-time when pandemic struck.

Yes, pandemic. This film was actually made a few years ago, but its story of a strange disease spreading quickly across the globe is a cue to our times -- right down to the masks people wear around each other as protection, unsure if they're even working. The malady takes the form of small rings that appear on the stomach, with the victim growing increasingly irritable and, eventually, violently mad.

The movie never trots out the "Z-word," and it's notable for not really focusing so much on the creatures as the remaining humans reacting to them. The whatever-you-call-them are, in fact, barely seen in the movie until nearly the end.

Instead the film focuses on the minutia of what Ann's daily life is like -- trying to trap animals, deciding which berries are safe to eat, fishing, digging through tree bark for grubs, stitching up her own wounds, etc. Most of it involves finding enough food to live, and Ann's shriveled body -- frequently displayed sans clothing -- lets us know what it's been like for her.

She also undertakes drastic steps to outwit the creatures. This includes collecting feces -- animals' and her own -- to smear all over her body to throw off her scent. She also saves her own urine to douse with as an emergency when she's being chased. A scavenging trip to a nearby compound is an exercise in preparation, wariness and gut reactions.

Of course, the whole movie couldn't be just Ann alone, so she eventually meets a couple of people. A teen girl, Olivia (Gina Piersanti) and her sort-of stepdad, Chris (Adam David Thompson), who is grievously wounded. Against her better instincts and craving for solitude, Ann takes them in and nurses Chris back to health. At first she's very wary, especially after Chris awakens and poses a potential threat.

"A lot of people would kill for this stuff," he says, looking at her (to him) sumptuous accommodations, not seeing the warning in Ann's eyes.

But eventually she warms up to them -- first Olivia, and later to Chris. This results in a creepy dynamic in which Olivia begins to grow resentful toward Ann, since Chris wants to keep on moving while Ann wants to stay put, and her pull winds up making their stay last another day, and then another. He isn't actually her stepdad -- her mom and he were engaged before the disease killed her and many others -- and the girl's thinking about how to lure him away from Ann takes her to some disturbing places.

There are flashback scenes of Ann, then a mother to a young baby girl, first leaving the city with her husband, Jason (Shane West), a skilled outdoorsman. He teaches her how to shoot and survive. Since Ann is alone now, we know how things turned out for her family. And we come to understand how that colors her interaction with this new, possible grouping.

"Here Alone" eventually gets to all the bloody and tense stuff, as we knew it would. But the center of the film is just one woman, alone but not lonely, making her way in terrible circumstances and finding a reservoir of strength she didn't know she had.

She's been changed by her experiences, in ways that perhaps make her not fit company to be around others, at least for some time. How long do our traumas linger with us, and how much attention should we pay to that little voice inside our heads saying we're not ready? Here is a movie that entertains while asking uncomfortable questions.