SYNOPSIS:
After a horrific car accident, Anna (Christina Ricci) wakes up to find the local funeral director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) preparing her body for her funeral. Confused, terrified and feeling still very much alive, Anna doesn’t believe she’s dead, despite the funeral director’s reassurances that she is merely in transition to the afterlife. Eliot convinces her he has the ability to communicate with the dead and is the only one who can help her. Trapped inside the funeral home, with nobody to turn to except Eliot, Anna is forced to face her deepest fears and accept her own death. But Anna’s grief-stricken boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) still can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Eliot isn’t what he appears to be. As the funeral nears, Paul gets closer to unlocking the disturbing truth, but it could be too late; Anna may have already begun to cross over to the other side.
MOVIE REVIEW:
The direct-to-video horror thriller “Afterlife” recalls the vampire film “Let Me In” in several ways. For one, both are slow-burners, and quiet ones at that, and demand patience on the part of its viewers. Both also straddled the middle ground between commercial horror and art house offering, and perhaps as a direct consequence, both failed miserably at the U.S. box office. But for all their similarities, there is a fundamental difference between the two- while “Let Me In” did not deserve the middling reception it got, “Afterlife” is unfortunately deserving of it.
Debut feature film director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, who also worked on the screenplay, hinges the entire movie on one question- is the schoolteacher Anna (Christina Ricci) dead from a car accident as the funeral director claims, or is she really still alive as she insists? Most of the time, Vosloo toys with her audience’s suspicion- one moment, she makes you think that Anna is trapped in a middle state between life and death, a soul unwilling to let go of her life on earth; and the next, she makes you think that there is something sinister going on with said funeral director Elliot Deacon (Liam Neeson).
There is also a subplot involving Anna’s boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) whom she was quarrelling with just before her accident, and whom she tries to communicate with to rescue her; as well as another involving a young boy Jack (Chandler Canterbury) who seems to have a special affinity with the afterlife and later forms a connection with Deacon. But since these are secondary to the mystery, Vosloo doesn’t pay enough attention to both these characters for them to matter enough.
Instead, what begins as a suspenseful mystery gets quickly bogged down by stiff and stifled exposition between Anna and Deacon as they muse philosophically about questions such as the fragility of life, and the complacent ways by which the living go about their lives. Although Vosloo tries to keep the pace of the movie measured and deliberate, her efforts only serve to prolong the periods of tedium where one quickly finds out that the interaction between the two characters is really insubstantial.
But the real disappointment is when the final reveal rolls around, and Vosloo decides against every better judgment to leave things hanging in the air. There is no payoff after all the waiting and the teasing; instead, things end on an equally ambiguous note that is meant to seem intelligent (or at least smarter than its viewer) but only ends up annoying and frustrating- that only leaves us to doubt if Vosloo even had an answer to that million-dollar question above in the first place.
Despite the best efforts of its cast therefore, “Afterlife” remains an extremely disappointing film that uses a tedious buildup for naught, especially for the lack of a resolution by the end of a dull and dreary 90 mins. Perhaps that’s why Vosloo managed to convince Christina Ricci to go naked for the second half of the movie, the beautiful actress the only thing resembling a sign of life here, and the only reason perhaps one would watch this bore
SPECIAL FEATURES:
NIL.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The Dolby Digital 5.1 uses the back speakers mostly for the score to build atmosphere. Visuals look as sterile as the morgue in which most of the movie is set.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING:
Review by Gabriel Chong
Posted on 9 April 2011
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