After.Life – Review

Reviews, Theatrical Reviews, Top Story

Liam Neeson is convincing, but the rest of this movie is dead on arrival.

You have to be careful of movies that have punctuation marks in their titles. Without the exclamation point Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! would just be The Informant. After.Life has a period in its title. Significance? Haven’t a clue. And there’s not a space after the period. I know that isn’t grammatical correct.

This horror flick comes from a first-timer Angineszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo. She has a strong visual sense, but sadly the written word doesn’t match her keen eye. (How can it with dialogue like “Is this the afterlife? Because it feels like hell.”) The result is a picture that is unfocused; it doesn’t know if it wasn’t to be a drama, a thriller, or a horror picture. Horror is the most likely, since it does adhere to a checklist of horror movie essentials – dead bodies, a creepy kid that looks like his arrival was an omen (or maybe he walked out from a cornfield), and fluorescent lights behaving erratically.

Christina Ricci plays Anna, a schoolteacher whose life has become so mundane. She’s in a going-nowhere relationship with Paul (Justin Long). Even when he tries to fulfill her sexually, Anna lies there motionless, her mind drifting. One night at a restaurant they have an ugly spat. She storms off upset and gets behind the wheel of her car still steamed. Driving hastily through heavy traffic in pouring rain leads to her death in a car accident. Next, she awakens on a coroner’s slab. Huh? But…but…shouldn’t she be dead? Awkward. Not only can she see but she can also sit upright and move around – no severed limbs or sinew dangling. Actually her figure is perfect, except for a gash in her forehead. How is all of this possible? That’s easy. “You died,” the coroner (Liam Neeson) assures her. So coroners can have conversations with dead people – beautiful. He should team up with Haley Joel Osment. The tagline writes itself: They aren’t ghost whisperers, but they can see – and talk to – dead people.

Other questions do pop up, but it would be boring to list them all here. Wojtowicz-Vosloo seems to take a concept that we’ve seen many times before in shows like The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, and in the 2007 film Awake, and give it more, um, life. But as we already know, life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The conversations Anna has with the meticulous coroner have a broad focus and are more or less ruminations on the nature of death and how you should appreciate life. This insight may be lost on the viewer, especially males, who are too busy looking at a naked Christina Ricci, who is in her birthday suit for three-fourths of the movie. Ricci’s character is the meat of the film, yet she’s either whining about being dead, which gets tiresome quickly, or she’s slinking around in the nude. The view might widen some eyes, but the nudity isn’t impactful to the drama unfolding.

Liam Neeson, instead of having his character play down to the material (see his performance as Zeus in Clash of the Titans), is an utmost professional as the morbid mortician Elliot Deacon. The day-to-day routine that Anna finds so tedious, he embraces. The way he takes off his shoes and hangs his dress coat, it was reminiscent of watching Mr. Rogers before he would talk directly to the audience or interact with puppets. Neeson may not break the fourth wall but he does talk to corpses.

Justin Long plays the boyfriend as a guy who won’t let sleeping dogs lie. He becomes so consumed by Anna’s death (or supposed death?) that his emotions change every time he’s onscreen. He’s angry, overwrought with guilt, and violent. The way he reacts to one of her students after cleaning out her belongings is close to matching Nicolas Cage’s lunacy in The Wicker Man remake.

Borrowing a page from M. Night Shymalan’s screenwriting handbook, Wojtowicz-Vosloo includes her own twists that leave the viewer in the dark as to what is transpiring. This is disconcerting those expecting a fulfilling ending.

After.Life is well-made visually, but offers nothing new to the “I’m not dead!” concept. Wojtowicz-Vosloo has taken what works fine as a TV episode and stretched it to three TV episodes. It’s not an outright bomb, but it’s not as smart as it tries to be. It’s somewhere in between, which is seems appropriate all things considered.


Director: Angineszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Notable Cast: Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, Justin Long
Writer(s): Angineszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo

Travis Leamons is one of the Inside Pulse Originals and currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Inside Pulse Movies. He's told that the position is his until he's dead or if "The Boss" can find somebody better. I expect the best and I give the best. Here's the beer. Here's the entertainment. Now have fun. That's an order!