Film Friday: After.Life (2009)

I’d never heard of After.Life until the other day. The film bombed in theaters, making only $3.2 million on a $4.5 million budget, and that’s a shame. This is a fascinating movie and is well worth watching. I can’t call it a great film, but it is an interesting film.

After.Life stars Liam Neeson as Eliot Deacon, the owner of a funeral home, and Christina Ricci as Anna, an unhappy school teacher. After a quick intro where we learn that Ricci and her boyfriend Paul Coleman (Justin Long) don’t really get along, Ricci wakes up on Neeson’s embalming table at the funeral home. She’s had an accident and has been pronounced dead. Neeson’s job is to prepare her for burial. But here’s the thing, she’s pretty sure she’s not dead. Neeson assures that she is. He explains that she had a car accident and was pronounced dead by the coroner at the scene. He shows her the death certificate and the wound on her head. She also suffers from periodic paralysis, which Neeson attributes to rigor mortis. But how can Neeson speak to her if she’s dead? He claims he has a gift which lets him speak to dead people.

The big thing this movie has going for it is mood. The whole film is creepy and you never once doubt the possibility that Ricci could be either dead or alive. And best of all, the film achieves this as a genuine psychological thriller, not a modern horror movie. Indeed, it rarely sinks to cheap scares or gross outs.

Neeson gives a strong performance, as I’ll discuss below. Ricci is quite good as well. Long is weak as the boyfriend who can’t shake the idea that Ricci might be alive, but he’s a sideshow. The real heart of this film lies is the question of whether or not Ricci is really alive or dead. And in that regard, this film is thought provoking. Why do we cling to life? Or do we? What would it take to convince us that we are dead? And how would you prove you wanted to live? I would have preferred a little more depth on the answers provided here, but the film certainly raises the questions well.

Beyond that, there’s nothing I can say without giving you a major spoiler warning. This film’s ambiance comes from trying to understand what is really going on and I’m about to tell you, so don’t read on if you haven’t seen the film.

** Spoiler Alert – I recommend seeing this film before continuing. **

Let’s talk about Neeson. Neeson gives a spectacular performance in this film. About three-quarters of the way through the film, it becomes fairly clear that Ricci is in fact alive and that Neeson is some sort of twisted serial killer. What’s interesting about Neeson’s portrayal up to this point, is that you can absolutely believe both scenarios. On the one hand, he comes across as exactly the kind of respectable man who would be a funeral director. He also plays the idea of the “gift” of being able to speak with the dead perfectly and you never doubt that it’s possible he is telling the truth. At the same time, he shows these moments of intense-but-controlled anger, which give you the sense that he could easily build up enough rage to be a killer.

But even more importantly, he gives a genuinely believable motive. I’ve discussed this before, that bad people rarely think of themselves as evil. To the contrary, they think of themselves as justified or even doing something noble, and that’s the case here. Neeson believes that people who don’t value life don’t deserve to have it. And if you listen closely, you will hear Neeson on several occasions offer Ricci a chance to prove she values life by walking out the door to freedom. This is her trial and she is judging herself, only she doesn’t know it.

This is such a strong motive that it both makes the character instantly credible and it helps you understand his methods. He’s not some standard psycho who tortures people because it gives him pleasure. In his mind, he’s executing people who judge themselves unworthy. His fake-death game is the trial. And interestingly, he seems willing to let himself get caught if the person does in fact walk out the door. That is a fascinating motive and it’s highly believable. Not only does this make his insanity “rational,” but it adds the element of risk which serial killers and gamblers view as such a turn-on. Indeed, this feels like a much greater risk than any other movie serial killer has taken because he puts his fate in the hands of his victims.

The writer was also smart to expose this motive slowly. You start to get a sense for it early and with each passing scene it becomes more clear. This makes for a more fascinating film than those where you have a cliché scene where the otherwise-normal killer suddenly rips off their mask and spews their motive in a melodramatic speech because this film lets you discover the motive as you would in real life -- through small hints.

Now, I’ve said this is an interesting film, not a great film. There are several reasons for that. The story itself is great, as is the struggle between Ricci and Neeson, but Long is a rather poor distraction -- he is a standard, irrational “movie” character. But the bigger problem is that while you watch the film, lots of things don’t make sense. In particular, this seems like a rather impossible way for a serial killer to work. He’s basically relying on people to be injured and then for the coroner to mistakenly declare them dead. That’s a hard bit of disbelief to overcome. But here’s the thing, the film actually answers this, it just doesn’t do it clearly enough that most people will realize what is really going on.

When Ricci has her accident, she is actually forced off the road by a white van, not the truck which Neeson tells her killed her. The white van is the same white van Neeson drives at the end of the film when Long has his accident. What is going on is that Neeson picks a target. He causes them to have an accident. Then, because he’s at the scene, he gives them a shot of Hydronium Bromide, which mimics death and fools the coroner. This explains all of the seeming coincidences, like how he gets his victims. It also explains the coincidence of Jack being Neeson’s son and yet being in Ricci’s class and then getting to know Long -- it’s no coincidence at all, he was sent to target both. If the film had given just a little more hint of this, then I think it would have been better received because, as it is, I suspect most people left the film feeling this was all too coincidental to be real.

I also would have liked to see the film explore a bit more into the question of why Ricci wants to live. This started well, but I think the writer didn’t quite have a solid answer other than “because the plot needs it.” So there is a missed opportunity there.

In any event, the interesting take away from this film is Neeson’s character, who is one of the most convincing serial killers in a long time because he truly seems motivated by a twisted sense of righteousness, rather than the usual “just because I’m evil” attitude most serial killers display. And it’s fascinating to watch him toy with fate by offering to let these people leave and then simultaneously letting them judge themselves. It’s an interesting way for him to wash his hands of his dirty deeds.

There is much here to like and to think about. I definitely recommend this film.