After.Life ««½
R, 104m. 2009
Cast & Credits: Liam Neeson (Eliot Deacon), Christina Ricci (Anna Taylor), Justin Long (Paul), Chandler Canterbury (Tom Peterson), Celia Weston (Beatrice Taylor). Screenplay by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, Paul Vosloo, and Jakub Korolczuk. Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo.
If someone told me they have no fear of anything, I’d have to question whether or not they are really human. I think we all have a fear of something. For me, other than being afraid of heights, one of my two darkest fears is that of being buried alive.
The other is being the unlucky victim of “Locked In Syndrome"; a condition where as a result of irreparable damage to the brainstem leaves the victim aware of their surroundings but they are unable to communicate, save for their eye movements. They can’t even move their mouths to eat. They are a vegetable. Although I can't remember where I read this on the Internet, an article I came across described the horrible condition as being buried alive.
Watching After.Life, I wondered if “Locked In Syndrome” was what school teacher Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) was suffering from as she was lying on a silver metallic slab at the local mortuary, half the time unable to move as mortician Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) slowly removes her clothes. Judging by the way Deacon meticulously and methodically works carefully choosing his surgical instruments, it’s obvious this isn’t the first time he has prepared the dead for a funeral service.
“You have to look beautiful for your funeral,” Deacon tells Anna. “This is how they are all going to remember you.”
Throughout much of After.Life, we see Anna and Deacon engage in brief dark conversations about life and death as she tries to convince him she really isn’t dead.
The dead always say that, Deacon tells her, who apparently may have the supernatural ability to talk with corpses. Or maybe the job of being a mortician and dealing with grieving families is such a lonely one, that he has never found the time to really converse with the living.
Even after being shown the death certificate, Anna still has trouble being convinced that she died in a car accident. So too, for a while are we.
Much of the first half of After.Life borders on being a chilling ghost story. We meet a bullied young kid (Chandler Canterbury), one of Anna’s students who, like Deacon, has the ability to see the dead. Or can he? If Anna is really dead, why is her breath on the mirror every time she looks at her pale, white corpse image? Anna’s long time boyfriend Paul (Justin Long), stricken with grief, suffers from horrible nightmares of seeing her naked in the shower holding her beating heart, and receives a spiritual phone call from Anna, that at first, he accepts as a prank call.
The trouble with her character is the same problem I had with Hillary Swank’s female aviator from last year’s box office failure, Amelia. The performance is just not good enough to make me feel for her emotionally and hope she might get out of this horrific dilemma. Like Swank’s Amelia where I found it hard to hope she would not meet her grim fate as history records, when Anna talks about the things she wished she had done when she was alive, the time to feel for her comes too late.
The film’s other downfall is the unique twist that’s revealed in the end. I am not going to tell you how it ends. What I will say is it’s not the kind of twist that makes one either laugh or walk out in unexpected amazement as the end credits roll that gets audience members asking each other, “What did you think of that ending?”
Is After.Life a grim, somber psychological horror and perhaps maybe even an intriguing murder mystery? Yes. Is it fun in the way one enjoys being scared? No. Even the hauntingly, slow moving song by Radiohead called "Exit Music" played as the end credits roll leaves one with a feeling a utter hopelessness. Will After.Life make it in the top ten box office hits for any week? No.
The film borderlines more between that of an independent art house film and a cult movie. I know it will likely have an “After Life” on DVD and Blu-ray, in particular, during Halloween.
Or maybe in a time where city councils are passing laws barring people from using cell phones and text messaging while driving, perhaps someone will use an early clip from the movie showing how Anna wound up on that metallic slab in the first place. She was fiddling around in her purse looking for her cell phone at the time. That might make for a good public service message as a means to tell people to concentrate more on the road, especially when driving at night during a heavy thunderstorm.
©4/12/10
R, 104m. 2009
Cast & Credits: Liam Neeson (Eliot Deacon), Christina Ricci (Anna Taylor), Justin Long (Paul), Chandler Canterbury (Tom Peterson), Celia Weston (Beatrice Taylor). Screenplay by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, Paul Vosloo, and Jakub Korolczuk. Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo.
The other is being the unlucky victim of “Locked In Syndrome"; a condition where as a result of irreparable damage to the brainstem leaves the victim aware of their surroundings but they are unable to communicate, save for their eye movements. They can’t even move their mouths to eat. They are a vegetable. Although I can't remember where I read this on the Internet, an article I came across described the horrible condition as being buried alive.
Watching After.Life, I wondered if “Locked In Syndrome” was what school teacher Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) was suffering from as she was lying on a silver metallic slab at the local mortuary, half the time unable to move as mortician Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) slowly removes her clothes. Judging by the way Deacon meticulously and methodically works carefully choosing his surgical instruments, it’s obvious this isn’t the first time he has prepared the dead for a funeral service.
“You have to look beautiful for your funeral,” Deacon tells Anna. “This is how they are all going to remember you.”
Throughout much of After.Life, we see Anna and Deacon engage in brief dark conversations about life and death as she tries to convince him she really isn’t dead.
The dead always say that, Deacon tells her, who apparently may have the supernatural ability to talk with corpses. Or maybe the job of being a mortician and dealing with grieving families is such a lonely one, that he has never found the time to really converse with the living.
Even after being shown the death certificate, Anna still has trouble being convinced that she died in a car accident. So too, for a while are we.
After.Life marks the second film this year I have seen to address a morbid subject. The first was Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, which I found insulting. I despised the way Jackson took the sad story of a murdered young girl, played by Saorise Ronan, completely told from her point of view in the “after life” from a fantasy standpoint. Seeing her romp around with other lost young souls in what could be a beautiful rendition of either Heaven or Purgatory as she looks down watching her family members grieve and the killer getting away with murder, I got the impression this is how clinically depressed people hope their next life will be like after committing suicide. What a lousy message.Now comes After.Life and its message here is just the opposite and more foreboding and unsettling. There is nothing to look forward to when you’re dead. That’s it. The mood here is as cold and reclusive as the metallic slab Anna is laid on. Or as cold as the cemetery and mortuary home Deacon resides in. Yet, I find myself more drawn to this one than The Lovely Bones.
Much of the first half of After.Life borders on being a chilling ghost story. We meet a bullied young kid (Chandler Canterbury), one of Anna’s students who, like Deacon, has the ability to see the dead. Or can he? If Anna is really dead, why is her breath on the mirror every time she looks at her pale, white corpse image? Anna’s long time boyfriend Paul (Justin Long), stricken with grief, suffers from horrible nightmares of seeing her naked in the shower holding her beating heart, and receives a spiritual phone call from Anna, that at first, he accepts as a prank call.
I loved the character exchanges and dialogue, in particular the lines spoken by Neeson and I found his performance friendly and creepy at the same time. His love of adorning his bedroom wall with photos of his corpses, one boasting emotion with their eyes open, the other of them at peace in their coffins, reminded me of the unstable photo employee Robin Williams played in One Hour Photo (2002), who by comparison adorns his walls with photos of a suburban family he is obsessed with.I enjoyed Ricci’s performance though I am hesitant, given that much of the role requires her to run around the mortuary either drugged up in red negligee and panties, while others she is sprawled out naked on the table, to say she makes a good looking corpse. I suspect fans of Maxim magazine who thrive on viewing scantily clad photos of female celebrities on a monthly basis will have no complaints in this department.
The trouble with her character is the same problem I had with Hillary Swank’s female aviator from last year’s box office failure, Amelia. The performance is just not good enough to make me feel for her emotionally and hope she might get out of this horrific dilemma. Like Swank’s Amelia where I found it hard to hope she would not meet her grim fate as history records, when Anna talks about the things she wished she had done when she was alive, the time to feel for her comes too late.
The film’s other downfall is the unique twist that’s revealed in the end. I am not going to tell you how it ends. What I will say is it’s not the kind of twist that makes one either laugh or walk out in unexpected amazement as the end credits roll that gets audience members asking each other, “What did you think of that ending?”
Is After.Life a grim, somber psychological horror and perhaps maybe even an intriguing murder mystery? Yes. Is it fun in the way one enjoys being scared? No. Even the hauntingly, slow moving song by Radiohead called "Exit Music" played as the end credits roll leaves one with a feeling a utter hopelessness. Will After.Life make it in the top ten box office hits for any week? No.
The film borderlines more between that of an independent art house film and a cult movie. I know it will likely have an “After Life” on DVD and Blu-ray, in particular, during Halloween.
Or maybe in a time where city councils are passing laws barring people from using cell phones and text messaging while driving, perhaps someone will use an early clip from the movie showing how Anna wound up on that metallic slab in the first place. She was fiddling around in her purse looking for her cell phone at the time. That might make for a good public service message as a means to tell people to concentrate more on the road, especially when driving at night during a heavy thunderstorm.
©4/12/10
No comments:
Post a Comment