After.Life (2009)

thereviewers
Jun 21, 2015
3 min read

After.Life revolves around Anna (Christina Ricci) waking up in a local funeral home, after a horrific car accident, to find Funeral Director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) preparing her body for her funeral. Confused, terrified, and feeling very much alive, Anna is forced to face her deepest fears and accept her own death. However, Anna’s grief stricken boyfriend, Paul (Justin Long), cannot seem to shake the nagging suspicion that Anna is still alive. Paul tries to unlock the disturbing truth before it becomes too late and Anna crosses over to the other side.

Overall Review Score

2.5 out of 10

Review

Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo and written by Paul Vosloo, Jakub Korolczuk and Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, After.Life is a unique 2009, 99-minute, American psychological horror-thriller that attempts to explore the concept of morality through a psychological thriller set in and around a funeral home. Despite, After.Life having a good premise, which sounded interesting and the film adopting a creepy and somewhat, satanic, undertone that could have easily engulfed the audience in a sinister horror complete with heart-pounding twists and turns, the film tremendously fails. It suffers from significant flaws, including poorly developed characters, frequent and unneeded nudity, and a plot that leaves the audience with many unanswered questions that serve to alienate the audience and make the movie become increasingly more incoherent and confusing as it unfolds. Overall, After.Life is film that fails to deliver, fails to entertain, and equally fails to answer the audiences questions – it will frustrate and leave the audience wondering why they spent 99-minutes watching it. It is ultimately a film, that while being spawn from a plausible and thrilling concept, is let down by a lacklustre script, poor acting, limited thrills, and a creepy atmosphere that uneasily hangs over the film and seeks to suck the fun right out of it.

Reviewer 1's score & comments:

Score: 3 out of 10

Comments:

After.Life is a unique mystery drama that leaves the audience with a lot of unanswered questions. Throughout the film the audience will keep asking themselves is Anna really dead or is the frankly psychotic funeral director doctoring her death certificate to keep her for his own ritualistic perversions? Some answers point to the former, such as, Anna being unable to communicate with Paul, while others point to the later, such as, the frequent injections given to Anna by Eliot Deacon and the mist on the mirrors after Anna exhales. Ultimately this conundrum is revealed after watching the audio commentary where the director reveals that Anna was alive during the whole film and that Eliot Deacon is a psychopath who is deciding who lives and who dies.

Reviewer 2's score & comments:

Score: 2 out of 10

Comments:

Watching After.Life is like watching in a slightly incomprehensible stranger going about an unusual, and somewhat perplexing, religious ritual while you watch and try to make sense of it without any notes or explanation...it makes very little sense and quickly leaves the audience with a lot of unanswered questions. While watching it the audience will be left wondering if Eliot Deacon is a murderer and if Anna is actually alive, hoping the answers will be revealed later on in the film. However, instead of revealing these secrets, the film ends rather abruptly leaving the audience in suspense. Due to these unanswered questions and the somewhat poor acting by the cast, After.Life came across as an unnecessarily creepy and poorly executed 99-minute thriller that will leave you annoyed and wishing you had not watched it.