Christina Ricci gets into a fight with her fiancé-to-be
(Justin Long) and flees the restaurant in tears. She winds up dying in a car crash and wakes
up on mortician Liam Neeson’s slab. She
isn’t ready to die yet, and he must assure her that dying is perfectly natural
and that he’ll do anything he can to make her “transition” as easy as possible.
After.Life has an overly theatrical plot device that works
surprisingly well thanks to the excellent performances by the two leads. Ricci rarely gets the spotlight so it’s nice
seeing her really sinking her teeth into a role that calls for her to bare her
soul (and her body) and show a range of emotions. Neeson is also great as the soft-spoken
mortician who occasionally gets perturbed by his corpses' antics. (He even calls them, “YOU PEOPLE!”, which is
a little corpsist if you ask me.) Rounding
out the cast, Justin Long isn’t bad, just miscast as Ricci’s asshole boyfriend.
If you came expecting a horror movie, you might be a little
disappointed. The horror aspects are a
bit subdued. Most of the horror comes
from Ricci’s inability to cope with her situation. The scenes of corpses being prepared for
their funeral are a bit icky too, but this is more or a spiritual drama (and a
good one too) than a horror film.
After.Life is overlong by about ten minutes or so. There’s an unnecessary subplot that tries to
make you think Ricci is actually alive and Neeson is merely playing a sick game
with her that could’ve easily been excised.
All it does is junk up the third act.
However, when it works, it’s a quietly powerful little movie; one that
deserved a wider release.
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