Zack MacLaren comes to after a bike crash, sees Zoey Miller leaning over him, hears her name and decides she is his girlfriend. She isn’t. His girlfriend is also called Zoey. The whole of “The Other Zoey”, a 2023 romantic comedy directed by Sara Zandieh from a script by Matt Tabak, hangs on that coincidence, and the premise holds up better than it has any right to.

Zoey (Josephine Langford) is a junior studying computer science at Queens University of Charlotte, and she does not buy romantic love as it is usually sold. Two people click, she thinks, when they think alike. On Valentine’s Day she answers Becca’s history-class presentation on Saint Valentine by calling the holiday a capitalist invention. She has even built an app that pairs people by algorithm. When Zack (Drew Starkey), the school’s soccer star, puts a ball into her head and rushes over to apologize, her roommate Elle (Mallori Johnson) finds it romantic. Zoey shrugs.

Then comes the crash. The doctor tells her not to upset the patient until he recovers, so she goes along with it, and his parents, played by Andie MacDowell and Patrick Fabian, invite her to dinner. The film is at its sharpest here. Zoey is not scheming. She is being polite to a man with a head injury, and every polite hour digs the hole deeper. There is also Avery (Olive Abercrombie), Zack’s younger sister, and Miles (Archie Renaux), his cousin, the same student who voiced Zoey’s own views on love in class and then vanished before she could say so.

The ski weekend is where the picture finds its warmth. Zack has to rest in the rented house, so Miles teaches Zoey to snowboard, and the hot tub kiss that follows feels earned. Langford and Renaux play it as two people relieved to meet someone who finally talks like them. Then Zack mentions Miles’s girlfriend, Zoey confronts him, and he explains that they are polyamorous. The film moves on almost at once. I wanted it to stay in that awkward moment a little longer, because it is the one point where her theory about shared minds meets something messier than a match score.

The next day she keeps Zack company. They play games and cook, and she says she hopes he will remember how nice the day was once his memory returns. It is the most tender stretch of the film, and Starkey does more with it than the amnesia premise promises. Elsewhere he has little to do but be pleasant.

The tone wobbles. Comedy and sincerity trade places without much warning, and some of the dinner-table material leans on familiar rom-com beats. When the real soccer-playing Zoey turns up and accuses her of identity theft, Zoey explains herself and apologizes. Avery blurts out that she prefers this Zoey. It is a good line, and a quick exit for a conflict the film had spent an hour building. Afterwards come campus rumors and a break with Elle, who had talked her into the lie. They make up soon enough. Becca then asks Zoey to build a web page for Jam Fest to repair her reputation, and she stays up all night to get it online. The ending is brisk and easy to like, though it settles things faster than the setup deserved.

Heather Graham plays Zoey’s mother, Paula, and the flight Zoey cancels to visit her is the cost of the whole deception. That relationship gets less room than I would have liked. MacDowell and Fabian, meanwhile, make the MacLarens a family you believe would take a stranger in without asking questions.

The film opened in limited theaters on October 20, 2023, and went to Amazon Prime Video as both streaming and video on demand. It is a small picture and plays well at home. Langford’s dry, quick performance keeps Zoey’s skepticism from turning sour, and that is what makes “The Other Zoey” worth an evening.