When watching movies, I like to be adventurous every once in a while. So in my ventures to the Redbox machine yesterday for what I call “new movie Tuesday”, I spotted a film that I had not heard of, After.Life. It stars Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, and Justin Long. A promising cast if there ever was one.
Directed by first timer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, After.Life is one of those weird thriller/dramas where you never quite know what’s going on and yet you’re still compelled to watch. The movie is centered around a funeral director, Eliot Deacon (Neeson) who has a strange gift (curse?) as he’s able to talk to the dead that come into his mortuary. One day, a young woman, Anna (Ricci), comes into the funeral home after dying in a car accident. Being able to talk to Eliot, Anna thinks she is still alive but she’s confined to the lab where Deacon prepares the bodies for funerals. The movie shifts back and forth between Anna thinking she’s dead and then trying to escape the mortuary because she subsequently thinks she’s still alive. As the viewer, you’re never quite sure if Anna is alive or dead until the final scene and even then it’s still a little hazy. Justin Long plays Anna’s would-be fiance who has commitment issues only until he finds out that Anna was supposedly killed in a car accident. The movie goes down the alley of is Eliot burying people alive or is he really tasked with taking people into the afterlife.
All around, the acting is pretty good and Long even sheds some tears in his first uber serious role in his career, but its the back and forth that Wojtowicz-Vosloo plays with the viewer that pretty much distorts the movie into being really good into “meh” territory. If there’s one incentive to watch After.Lfeit’s to see Christina Ricci naked in 3/4’s of the movie. She spends just about all of her screen time on a table naked, which is never a bad thing. There is one question I have to ask however, is does anyone else think Ricci looks like sleep-deprived crackhead in all of her movies? Neeson is spot on as the tormented funeral director who is tasked with transitioning the corpses that come into his funeral home to the “after life.” There is one particular scene in the movie that involves Ricci’s character and a burial ritual with some old women in which maggots start coming out of her mouth. It’s not that it was disturbing, because it was, it was just extremely out of place.
If you’re searching for an odd movie that features A-list actors, a promising story, and tits look no further than After.Life. It ultimately falls short of what it could have been but it’s still entertaining for the most part.
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