With After.Life, award winning NYU student filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo graduates from student films to feature length big screen films. Wojtowicz-Vosloo's After.Life is a film with ambiguity at its heart. Christina Ricci plays Anna, a teacher who is unhappy with her life and who dies in a car crash after she and her significant other Paul (Justin Long) argue at a restaurant. The question Wojtowicz-Vosloo wants us viewers to apparently ask is the question of whether Anna is really dead and in a kind of purgatory for the dead and is being helped by good hearted mortician and funeral home owner Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson), who can see and talk to the dead, to come to grips with her mortality--Wojtowicz runs a bit of the Kubler-Ross playbook here--or whether Anna is really being held prisoner and is being tortured by the very inexpressive and creepy Deacon for his fun and Polaroid pleasure--Deacon as reverse Frankenstein?
After.Life never really reveals the answer to these questions though director Wojtowicz-Vosloo claims otherwise in interviews. Paul may come to believe that Anna is alive and try to convince others that she lives and he may try to save his damsel in distress from Deacon's clutches before he too dies in an automobile accident. Deacon may wipe Anna's breath from a mirror. Anna may wreak the embalming room but we never see anyone clean up the mess. Anna's student Jack (Chandler Canterbury) may have seen Anna through the window of Deacon's Gothic like funeral home--the horror, the horror--but then Jack, who becomes Deacon's protégé, may, as Deacon says, simply be one of those rare people who can see dead people and help them come to grips with their death. In many ways After.Life wants to have its cake and eat it too. As a result, we viewers inevitably have to ask whether director Wojtowicz-Vosloo is simply pulling our chains with her cinematic tricks.
After.Life is stylishly directed, beautifully filmed, nicely fills the screen with living reds and deathly blacks, nicely transforms the instruments of a mortician's profession into "eerie" instruments of torture, horror and terror, and creates an eerie atmosphere of terror and horror out of the clinical accoutrements of the clinical and sterile underneath of a funeral home and the burial of a young woman who may or may not be alive. Despite all of this, however, I found it hard to maintain an interest in a film that plays its trump card way too early. I was also unable to identity with any of the characters and suspect that the actors were told (or decided) to limit their verbal and physical expressions in order to maintain the ambiguity--is she or isn't she dead--at the heart of the film. Two and a half stars. Others, particularly those who long to see Christina Ricci naked, a lot, on the other hand, will probably find much to enjoy about After.Life.
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