After.Life

Christina Ricci is the billboard-forehead love of my life, so I was pumped beyond reason to find out that she was starring in another horror movie. Her last foray into horror was Cursed, a werewolf flick that became a movie critic chew toy. Sure, ultimately it wasn’t a timeless movie milestone, but it also didn’t really deserve such terrible press.

My excitement burst into unbridled glee when I found out that my darling Christina was totally butt naked through about half of After.Life. That was enough to slam dunk it for me, but what about the rest of you unfortunate souls who don’t feel such undying adoration for Her High Forehead Highness? Does this movie have anything to offer those who aren’t Ricci freaks like me?

I’m happy to declare that yes, it undeniably does. If you like mystery, drama, and/or horror sans any predictable Hollywood trappings, you should get a big kick out of this flick. It keeps you constantly guessing… “Is she, or isn’t she?” “Is he, or isn’t he?” “Does that mean what i think it means?” Even as the credits roll, shadows of doubt will still haunt your mind. After.Life successfully shrouds itself in uncertainty and stays open to interpretation without falling into the same trap that so many similar films do, which is to mistake confusing the audience for misdirecting the audience. M. Night Shyamalan could learn a lot from this movie, though I fear (hope) it may be too late for his career even if he does.

At the heart of After.Life is a tangle of seemingly unanswerable questions: Is Christina Ricci’s character “Anna” alive, or is she dead? If she’s alive, why doesn’t she have a pulse? If she’s dead, how is she able to get off the mortician’s table and wander around the mortuary? And how is it that the mortician can hear Anna and converse with her? Does he truly possess the special gift to communicate with the dead, as he claims? Or is that just a lie he tells her to keep her captive in his mortuary until he can doom her to a premature burial?

Liam Neeson seems to alternate between benevolent and threatening as the mortician “Eliot Deacon”. One moment he is kindly soothing Anna with promises that he will ease her travel into the afterlife, and the next he is angrily fuming about how every single dead person unlucky enough to end up on his slab asks him the same questions and gives him nothing but trouble.

Anna’s boyfriend, “Paul” (Justin Long), can’t shake the feeling that Anna isn’t dead. He has seen Anna’s death certificate, and he has seen the smashed up car in which Anna may or may not have met her end, but he is having none of it. He demands to be allowed to see her body, but since he isn’t family, Eliot Deacon turns him away. Paul then freaks out on the police chief, demanding that he get a warrant to search the mortuary to find Anna. Is Paul just suffering a mental breakdown in colossal denial, or does he truly and really feel – perhaps even know – that Anna is still alive?

Though I thoroughly enjoyed Ricci’s chronic lack of clothing, others are sure to find it off-putting, and call it exploitative. And though I thoroughly love movies that keep you guessing up to (and beyond) the last minute, others are sure to feel “jerked around” because they aren’t being spoon-fed in the usual Hollywood style. But if you’re looking for something new and different, and you can look beyond or even appreciate these aspects, then you should definitely check out After.Life.

Related posts:

1. Pocahauntus Real Life Murders
2. Pro-Life – Masters of Horror (Season Two)

Posted in: Horror Movies »  by: Morbidementia

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