‘Dylan & Zoey’ (2022) Review: Nuanced Characters Explore Trauma
Matt Sauter’s Dylan & Zoey explores adult friendships and the effects of trauma on human lives. Long-time best friends, Dylan (Blake Scott Lewis) and Zoey (Claudia Doumit, The Boys) try to rekindle their friendship. They roam the streets of Los Angeles and bar-hop throughout the night, as their conservations dig deeper into their traumas. Dylan & Zoey is a vulnerable movie that discusses a heavy subject matter and explores the imperfections of the two characters, as they look back at their friendship.
The movie begins with Zoey contemplating whether or not to text her old friend, Dylan, in an attempt to reconnect with him. She scrolls through his Instagram page, and eventually sends him a text. They decide to meet up at Dylan’s house but when they reconnect, they realise that things have changed between them. She starts to make wild guesses and asks questions about his life in an effort to get to know him. The estranged best friends agree to spend the night catching up, listening to live music at clubs, and walking through the streets of Los Angeles. It’s a night full of conversations, but there is an unspoken tension that runs between them. At every turn, their issues from the past and present keep turning up in every conversation. They try to figure out why they lost touch with each other and mend their friendship by talking through the problems.
Dylan & Zoey is a fascinating movie, where the conversations provide an insightful look at their friendship. Both of the characters are intelligent people that have very different lives, and they know how to deal with their trauma. From the very beginning, the movie lets the audience know that Dylan experienced sexual abuse as a child. It’s part of the reason why he is socially awkward and his trauma makes it incredibly difficult for him to live a normal life. Even though he is slowly dealing with it, he still has crippling anxiety and unsurfaced anger that makes it impossible to finish the tasks. This experience, as the audience learns, has made it difficult to form a relationship with people.
Throughout their conversations, Zoey is sympathetic because, she too, was raped in college. However, she refuses to be a victim. She deals with her trauma by making self-deprecating jokes. There’s a hidden layer that neither Dylan nor Zoey reveals to the other. It’s hard to move on from trauma. Those exact words are not said to each other but due to their experiences, they are able to feel empathy. Even though they freely talk about their shared experiences with trauma, and poke fun at it occasionally, both of them are aware of how much it has affected their lives.
Through intense conversations, sharing personal stories, and becoming each other’s wingmen, Dylan & Zoey explore the trope of a young girl and a boy walking through the city at night — an element of the time-tested indie films. While Doumit and Lewis’ characters aren’t groundbreaking, they provide nuanced performances. Their vulnerability is shown in many of their scenes, especially when both of them share their traumatic experiences with each other. It’s a sensitive movie that explores reconnecting and mending friendships, with intelligent characters that are able to peel off each layer after every fight. Dylan & Zoey invites the audience into a conversation between two people with relatable experiences of their lives.
