Monday, September 13, 2010

Movie Review: After.Life

I will be the first to admit that I'm very gullible when it comes to watching things and falling into the 'traps'. I like to think that I'm a fairly clever girl, with a grasp of foreshadowing and such, but when the twist ending of 'The Sixth Sense' happened I was seriously picking my jaw up off the floor in complete awe. Similar things have happened to me in much less grand scale; I very rarely can predict where something is going unless it's blatantly obvious, and you know what? I like it that way. I like being kept on my toes, holding my breath and seeing what kind of ride the director is taking me on.

A film that blew my mind in a way that very few do is "After.Life". Starring Christina Ricci, Justin Long and Liam Neeson, I first saw the trailer for this indie gem at the Anchor Bay table at Texas Frightmare Weekend and was quite intrigued. The premise is fascinating enough: a young schoolteacher (Ricci) in a tumultuous relationship with her boyfriend (Long) gets into a car accident only to wake up in the local funeral home with the mortician (Neeson) trying to convince her that she's dead and it's his job to help her cross over. The movie is extremely existential, with Neeson's character asking Ricci's what she would've done differently, why she was so distressed at the thought of death when she wasn't really enjoying her life as it was anyway. The performances are incredibly solid; Long is perhaps the standout as the heartbroken, emotional wreck of an alcoholic boyfriend who is left to deal with the aftermath of the guilt over his girlfriend's death. Neeson is charismatic and sufficiently unsettling, his very charm and eloquence making him all the more unsettling; it is incredibly easy to picture him as a gentle guide to those in limbo between life and death, but as the film's events progress and the plot twists begin, his gurney-side manner begins to take on a sinister edge. Ricci is ethereal and beautiful as always, a haunting performance of a young woman who doesn't know if she cares that she's dead; she doesn't want to die but is afraid to live, and therein the dilemma lies.

The movie is beautifully shot, with incredible use of symbolism in the colors it chooses. Most things are monotonous, soft shades of gray and white and a bluish tint like death; the only flares of color, truly, are a vibrant and striking red, which has always represented life and passion and fire in culture. While Ricci is in denial of her own mortality, she wears a slinky red slip, insisting that she wants to live and doesn't deserve to die so young; when she accepts her own fate, she allows herself to be stripped naked by Neeson, then dressed in somber funeral attire, at which point she succumbs to her impending burial and refuses to fight for continued existence on this plane. She even dyes her hair red at the beginning of the film to shake up her humdrum life, a move criticized cruelly by her mother and boyfriend and later, Neeson washes the red out of her hair and returns it to its normal brown for her funeral. The life in her, like the dye, was temporary and easily taken from her; she has no permanence to her own mortality, no reason to continue to fight for something she doesn't believe is worth the effort in the first place.

"After.Life" is a thriller full of suspenseful twists and turns, but it is also a thinking-man's movie. It provokes one to question their own values and how much their own life is worth to them; it also slides effortlessly between potential twists so smoothly you are unsure what's reality and what isn't, leaving you as an audience member just as bewildered and disconcerted as Ricci's character in the film. Certainly worth checking out, this film is a warped trip through the heart and soul of our own mortality, making us question the boundaries of life, love, and self-fulfillment that we all possess deep down inside.