After.Life (2009) Reviews

• Good but slightly flawed

  skywarp-102010-09-30

  Did most of these reviewers actually watch the same movie as me. There will be spoilers in this review so watch out :) The basic story of the movie concerns a young girl, clearly struggling with life and her relationships. After a car crash she 'awakens' in a mortuary only to be told that shes dead. The rest of the movie covers Liam Neeson (the undertaker)and his attempts to convince her that she is in fact dead and help prepare her for her funeral. But is she really dead? This movie is not about life after death. Its not about what happens when you die. This movie is about people not really living their lives, wandering through life like they're dead already. I think its fairly obvious that the main character is in fact very much alive when taken to the undertaker. Numerous clues point to this in the movie, breath on the mirror, the 'muscle relaxant' that shes injected with and the fact that shes walking around and has to be locked in :)and finally to confirm that Neeson is lying, in the final scenes he clearly kills the boyfriend. But the movie has several scenes that seem to ruin this, and push the film to seeming supernatural grounds. With numerous scenes, or nightmare scenes like the confrontation with her younger self, and the old woman's corpse walking and talking. These slightly detract from the overall focus of the storyline, but keep you guessing if she is alive or dead. In the end, this is a good movie, with an interesting story and direction, only slightly let down by some of the scenes. Well worth a watch.

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• Good idea gone wrong

  Samiam32010-08-28

  Driving carelessly in the rain one night, Anna Taylor has a car accident which kills her. She is DOA, or is she. Anna wakes up in the basement of the local funeral home, and the funeral director tells her that she is dead (with a certificate to prove it). He also tells her that he can talk to the dead. Anna wants out, but he will not let her leave, claiming that she must accept the truth. Is she really dead or is he nuts? After Life has a great set-up, but from there, things get worse. What keeps the viewer hooked is the promise of an an upcoming climactic twist, like that in the Sixth Sense (the film which After Life has its roots in). Unfortunately, with each passing chapter, it becomes more evident that the outcome we would like is not going to come. Yet what is more bothersome about After Life is that frankly it is dull. I see an idea here, but I don't see a movie. After Life recalls Awake in that it functions well as an experiment in psychologically related themes, but it doesn't provide exiting or suspenseful material. After Life has really nowhere to go, but down. Despite being partial fantasy, its inability to make sense is aggravating and not acceptable. After Life could have and should have been way more potent than this.

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• A confused, clumsy piece of pretentious melodrama.

  furtherintime2010-08-12

  Ah, here we see yet another self-assuming, clunky mess of a film. We should have known, having seen the pretentious dot that has been placed between the two words of the title for no apparent reason. The opening is somewhat promising, involving a bored and depressed Christina Ricci, who gets involved in a budget-effective car crash and wakes up in a funeral parlour with the grim Liam Neeson looming over her, explaining that she is in fact, dead. That he tells her her blood flow has stopped before promptly injecting her with drugs (a rather pointless endeavour for someone with no circulation) denies the essence of her film-long confusion. But that doesn't seem to bother anyone at this point, because we like to give movies the benefit of the doubt, don't we. Unfortunately, Ricci's sole demonstrable skill in the film appears to be going from squeaky desperation to grim, monotonous acceptance and back again in a matter of minutes. This simply serves to add more confusion to the already bizarre plot, and ultimately makes us unsympathetic during the final scenes. The problem with the film is that it has no idea what it is. The director has clearly been hoping for a cut above the average horror flick, but there is not enough originality or wisdom to transform it into anything else. The result is a cheap and excessively melodramatic B-side horror, which lacks the spooky scares that make its tawdry counterparts so much more exciting. The fact that the film takes itself so very seriously throughout makes it all the more infuriating. One of the film's very few silver linings is Liam Neeson's understated performance as the unhinged funeral director, convincingly dishing out a mix of soothing sobriety and chilling psychosis, and managing to drag some life out of the clumsy and repetitive script. But then, you'd expect that from a man so undeniably bad-ass that he's even played an actual lion in a film. A diluted and overlong episode of The Twilight Zone, for horror completists and fans of Ricci's feminine form only. POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW I find the ending worth a mention. Downer endings are all well and good in the right context. When the film's content is strong, and there is method and moral to the disappointment, one can still come away from it feeling rewarded, or at least provoked into contemplation. Unfortunately, none of this is applicable to After.Life. The film's plot relies on the prospect of a recovery and reconciliation between its two leads; the character development is too thin and plot points too few and far between to allow for anything else. So, after having sat through an hour and a half of dreary nothingness, we as a now solidly popcorn-eating audience expect the alleviation of some form of resolve, to reward us for enduring the rest of the film and to tick one final box in the series of clichés that it has been following so avidly throughout. But unfortunately, the film seems to think that a negative finale is a one-way ticket to critical acclaim. And once upon a time, it was, but now this is simply not enough. And so, we are left with an uninspired and underwhelming descent into rigor mortis, with the bad guy living to strike again, and again, and again. God forbid.

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• Good idea, great actors, but the film just has too many flaws.

  Rizzlie2010-08-11

  I understand that this is a film that will divide opinions. Perhaps it is intelligent. Perhaps it has a most wonderful, original idea for a movie that made me rent it in the first place. Perhaps Liam Neeson and Christina Ricci are wonderful actors. But it doesn't change the fact that the film simply has too many flaws. You can accept a few in an otherwise good film, but having too many of them simply destroys the atmosphere. That is precisely what happened in this case, in my opinion. Allow me to elaborate. George Lucas once said that a movie doesn't have to follow the rules of our reality in order to be believable, it just needs to follow the rules of its own reality. This is exactly where this movie fails. It creates an unexplained horror world where something absurd happens every now and then: lights go out every time a lady walks past them with a big noise until the whole corridor has turned black (how cliché is THAT?!), plastic bumping head starts suddenly moving for no apparent reason, following a guy when he is walking. I wish the movie would have at least allowed me to believe that it was something the characters imagined in their heads, as in some other, more respectable scenes. But no, the guy didn't even see the lifeless bumpy head moving, it just did so for no apparent reason. What is so "psychologically thrilling" about that? These kinds of events go on and on. For example, after the might-be-dead lady escapes from the man holding her as prisoner, she suddenly starts bumping into walls (in a straight corridor!) and making a terrible noise. Possibly we are supposed to assume that she is so scared she has become hysteric, but then again she didn't seem hysteric either in the previous or in the following scene, nor is she in any immediate danger - the guy holding her as prisoner isn't really threatening in any way. The words "for no apparent reason" are key words for several events in this movie. Believibility requires a reason for a cause. This movie doesn't provide them, just irregular events placed around the plot - events that more often than not don't affect the plot any way, I might add. The most disturbing part for me, however, was the way it dealt with the questions of life and death. It tries to talk about in-depth questions - what happens to us when we die, and are we really that alive when we live our pathetic fear-run lives, and so forth - but ends up stating clichés such as "we die to make life more meaningful" or something along those lines. Something we have heard billion times before in every funeral (or B-class drama movie) we've gone to. The movie is filled with tons of other clichés as well - along the lines of "you are more afraid of living than of dying", and a small child telling the woman "I am you" when she asks who the kid is in her nightmare (or whatever you call them weird visions all the characters keep getting every now and then), and so forth. And the worst part is, these clichés just won't stop! There is hardly any action, just line after line, and EVERY SINGLE LINE seems to be one I've heard a dozen times before! I wonder if the screenwriters were on strike when this film was scripted, because a good idea just falls flat this way. And finally - what exactly happens to a person when he/she dies? The question of whether he/she will go on living as a spirit of some sort is an intriguing question. That is a question that doesn't seem to concern this movie at all. The question that does concern this movie - whether the body can go on living, running in the hallways and throwing stuff around - is not an intriguing one, not to me at least. Sure, one could respect it in a 50's style zombie-horror-movie. And if this was one, I might accept it. But this isn't one. This is supposed to be an intellectual movie raising intellectual questions about life and death. To assume that we should even consider the possibility that a MATERIAL BODY jumping around throwing things (and BREATHING, for Christ's sake) could be DEAD, is underestimating the intelligence of the same audience for whom the movie is sold to as an "intelligent psychological thriller". All of the above is more or less absurd. And I am a person who finds absurdity amusing. I suppose one could respect a movie for making one burst out a laughter every few minutes. But if its unintentional, there seems to be something wrong with either the script or directing (sometimes acting, too, but not in this case). Seriously, I did laugh every now and then. Out loud too, not just inside my head. And an "intelligent psychological thriller" shouldn't make you do that. Liam Neesom is a wonderful actor - once again. That gives this film two stars. Third one for a good attempt to create something original - even though in my eyes the attempt somewhat failed in this case. I would love to give more stars to an original and a clever idea, but every time I try to go for the fourth a picture of the moving plastic head bumps into my head and once again I begin to laugh.

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• After.Life - there is a clue in the title

  gradyharp2010-08-07

  AFTER.LIFE (yes, that is a dot between the two words suggesting this may be a video game...or blog, or something created in cyberspace) takes a long shot; can a one-line story keep an audience's attention for over 103 minutes? Not having noticed whether this played in theaters or is one of the direct to DVD films, that question is tough to answer. The director and writer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo (writing in tandem with Paul Vosloo and Jakub Korolczuk) asks us to suspend belief and muse about the idea that there is a time between 'death' and the actual burial (or other means of final interment/disposal) when the spirit may struggle with the idea of life ending. It is an interesting hiatus to study and fortunately a cast was selected to portray the characters involved in this internet-like game that makes it watchable. Schoolteacher Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) and Paul Coleman (Justin Long) are in a rocky relationship: they could be headed toward marriage but Anna has trust issues that prevent her from committing to same. In a rage she leaves the frustrated Coleman, subsequently is killed in a car accident, and is taken to a mortuary where mortician Elliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) begins preparing her body for the funeral. Anna is unable to move anything but her mouth and denies that she is dead, a situation Deacon encounters with most every dead body he prepares for burial. And this is where the conundrum begins: is Anna dead or is she alive, kept prisoner by Deacon? Anna's hateful mother (Celia Watson) visits her daughter's corpse and has few kind words to say. Paul is devastated, comforted by his colleague Tom (Josh Charles), that Anna is dead and visits the mortuary to see the body but is refused admittance by Deacon. One of Anna's young students Jack (Chandler Canterbury) seems to have a special affinity for the dead and spies on the mortuary where he sees Anna standing in a window. Anna and Deacon have long talks about the after.life - that time when the soul is preparing to leave the corporal body - and Deacon continues to prepare Anna for her funeral. As she is buried the facts of the story straighten out a bit, but to reveal those facts would ruin what little suspense there is in this film. Though the moody atmosphere is well captured by both the director of photography Anastas N. Michos and the musical score by Paul Haslinger, and the presence of Liam Neeson who plays his role very straight and Christina Ricci who plays her role almost entirely in the nude, give the story the requisite creepy effect. Yes, it is corny in many ways, but at least it is a bit different from the formula movies that keep churning out of Hollywood. Grady Harp

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