Browse all reviews by letter     A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 - 9

aka - Afterlife
USA 2009
Directed by
Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
100 minutes
Rated R

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

After.Life

Some films can make you a little sad that they fail to realize their potential and one such is After.Life, an M. Night Shyamalan-ish supernatural drama. It’s got a good cast and it's well-crafted but ultimately fails because iy doesn’t really have much to say about what is, let's face, a subject no-one really knows anything about.

Christina Ricci plays Anna Taylor, a school teacher dissatisfied with her life who is killed in an accident after an argument with her boyfriend. Paul (Justin Long). She ends up in a funeral home being ministered to by Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson), a quiet-spoken mortician who has the ability to talk to the dead. Strange that may be but even more strange, the dead can talk to him. Or are they really dead?

Director and co-writer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo knows how to make an elegant-looking film but has fumbled the mixture of drama and horror/thriller. Although the film plays quite intriguingly with the question of whether Anna is really dead or under the influence of the eerily dispassionate Mr Deacon, who for some reason runs his business out of a mock-Elizabethan mansion and has no employees. Anna, who is supposed to have been crushed under a semi-trailer load of pipes spends most of the time in a scarlet slip with a cut on her forehead as Mr Deacon looms over her. Unfortunately the script makes it fairly apparent that she is dead so that leaves Wojtowicz-Vosloo with no choice keep but the plot going with Gothic dream sequences and the boyfriend going mad with grief as the film flips back and forth on the “is she or isn’t she” question. This is probably more or less acceptable for a genre film but much of the film is given over to the duologue between Anna and Eliot as the latter is supposed to be easing his reluctant charges in their transition to ….well, exactly. To what? Whilst this scenario has potential as “meaning of life” material (as explored in films as diverse as It's A Wonderful Life (1946) and The Fountain, 2006) it never amounts to more than Eliot’s dyspeptic view of the inauthentic life and his viewpoint is not put even that elegantly.

Had the script been worked into something more substantial it could have been much better than it is.

 

 

back

Want something different?

random vintage best worst