DIRECTED BY: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
FEATURING: Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long
PLOT: A funeral director must convince an accident victim that she is really dead.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I took a look at After.Life to determine its weird potential, but aside from the macabre story, I found it be a fairly conventionally psychological thriller.
COMMENTS: Despite the pretentious dot in the middle of the title, After.Life turns out to be a well-made, offbeat picture. Christina Ricci, while no Ingrid Bergman, delivers a credible performance even though she is slashed with cherry red lipstick and alternately nude or scantily draped in a clingy, scarlet satin slip for most of the movie.
After a violent car crash, Anna Taylor (Ricci) wakes up on a slab in a mortuary (where else?) Eliot Deacon, a psychic undertaker (Neeson) must talk her into cooperating with the embalming process and mentally preparing herself for the afterlife.
Blessed/cursed with the gift of second sight which allows him to see the spirits of the deceased, Deacon is exasperated that he must argue and wrestle with every one of his dead clients, none of whom are at first willing accept the reality of their deaths. Conversing with Deacon, Anna, like her predecessors, refuses to believe she’s dead despite his assurance that she’s in transition to the spirit realm, and that he’s the only one who can help her make the leap into the uncertain beyond
While sill on the steel gurney in the embalming room, Anna has several sinister forays into the ethereal plain to which she is about to permanently transcend. Frightened, uncertain, and unwilling to depart this dimension to venture into the next, she requires a good bit of coaxing from Deacon. Anna is a hard case and she makes quite a fuss. Deacon has his hands full dealing with her and she proves to be his most uncooperative stiff to date.
Matters are complicated when Anna’s mooky boyfriend (Long) shows up demanding to view her body for closure. Deacon manages to run him off, but the pesky beau just can’t seem to stay away. He becomes a fly in the pickling balm when he insists upon clinging to the Continue reading CAPSULE: AFTER.LIFE (2009)