My review of the 2009 psychological horror movie After.Life
The "After.Life" is not what it's made out to be...
I didn’t intend to make a review of this movie, because while it isn’t nearly as mediocre as its IMDb rating would have you assume and it is a VERY solid psychological horror movie with solid performances from the two legendary actors Liam Neason and Christina Ricci (who is perfectly cast as a “corpse”) I felt there wasn’t much to talk about as it seemed to me the movie was straight forward (though a bit sad and bleak).
But then I read some of the reviews and now I feel I have to talk about it, cause most people have gotten this movie all wrong.
I am not one to use ChatGPT but I am gonna make an exception here, cause my whole point here is to show that even when it comes to simple things like movie reviews which are a matter of opinion and that you therefore normally can’t really get “wrong”, CrapGPT still manages to get it dead wrong - pun intended.
So here is ChatGTA’s somewhat typical, but actually objectively wrong review and explanation of the film After.Life:
“In the film, Anna Taylor (played by Christina Ricci) is killed in a car accident, but wakes up in a funeral home where she is tended to by a funeral director named Eliot Deacon (played by Liam Neeson). Deacon claims that Anna is dead and that he has the ability to communicate with the dead and help them transition to the afterlife.
Throughout the movie, there is ambiguity about whether Anna is actually dead or if she is still alive and being held against her will by Deacon. As the story unfolds, Anna's boyfriend Paul (played by Justin Long) becomes increasingly suspicious of Deacon's intentions and tries to rescue Anna.
The ending of the movie reveals that Anna has been dead all along, and she finally accepts her death and moves on to the afterlife. However, there is a twist: it's implied that Deacon may actually have the ability to communicate with the dead, as Anna's spirit is shown interacting with him after she has passed away.”
So according to GrabDHL, the “twist” is basically that things are exactly as they seemed all along. That wouldn’t be much of a twist, would it? I realize that many people argue that the movie is ambiguous and the ending is up to interpretation and that therefore LagGLS’s explanation might not be objectively true, but it’s also not objectively wrong.
Except that it is objectively wrong. First off; the claim that “Anna's spirit is shown interacting with him (Deacon) after she has passed away” just isn’t true. I don’t know what movie ChapLSD has been “watching” but it sure wasn’t this movie as there simply is no such scene in it and we never get to see Anna’s spirit at all. I mean sure, throughout the entire movie she is interacting with Eliot Deacon, but directly and in person and you don’t need to be dead for that. And yes, the question of her being truly dead and Liam Neeson’s character having the supernormal power to speak to the dead or simply having kidnapped her and making that claim, is the premise of the movie.
But what made it pretty obvious is exactly the very fact that she CAN still directly interact with people (dead people usually have a rather hard time with that). And sure, Eliot Deacon having the ability to speak to the dead would be an explanation for that. Except of course that we also see her interacting with a whole bunch of other people, most notably the kid and Paul, so do they all have Deacon’s gift?
But more importantly, we see her walking around the entire house and interacting with all kinds of objects all the time. Again, dead people usually have a hard time with that. She even steals the scissors and the knife and uses them to defend against Deacon, she also steals his key and uses it to unlock the door and then she even breaks the key and eventually she even trashes the whole place and smashes pretty much every object in the room.
Now, you could argue that maybe that’s all in her head, except that Deacon clearly reacts to all of those actions by her and even gets very angry at her when he comes back and sees that she trashed the room. He also completely panics and comes running back when he realizes she has taken his key for the door that locks her in.
Now if in reality she would really be an immobile corpse lying on her table in the morgue, why would he panic after realizing she has taken his key and is using it to escape? How could an immobile corpse even hold a key, much less steal it, use it to unlock a door and then break it? And why would someone who is dead even need a key to leave?
So obviously and objectively, she isn’t dead. This becomes even more clear if we listen to what Deacon tells the kid:
“Don’t you see? I have no choice. I’m the only one who can see all these corpses. Wandering the earth aimlessly. All they do is piss and shit. Suffocating us with their stench. Doing nothing with their lives. Taking the air away from those who actually want to live. I have to bury them all. I have no choice.”
Actual corpses don’t defecate nor would they be able to continue to waste their lives. So obviously he isn’t referring to actual corpses. Yes, he has the unique ability to be able to “see dead people”. But that’s because what he regards as the dead and as “corpses” are not people who are literal corpses, but people who are dead inside and therefore waste their life, taking up valuable space. Those he regards as truly dead and so he thinks he does the world a service by burying them.
In the movie there is a (hopefully fictitious) substance that can make a person appear to be dead, while actually still being alive (as explained by the police in the movie) and we clearly see him injecting that substance into Anna each time others are allowed to see her. But then how did Anna get declared dead in the first place? Because then wouldn’t he have had to be with Anna at the time of her accident? Yes! And the movie actually DOES imply that he was there at the time of her accident. Actually the movie implies that he intentionally caused her accident in the first place.
This is the van from the beginning that drives behind her and incessantly honks at her, getting her to drive faster and provoking her accident in the first place:
In a flashback this same van is then even clearly seen overtaking her car and forcing it into the truck:
And this is Deacon’s van as seen later in the movie when he hurries to drive back after realizing she has taken his key and tries to escape:
It’s the exact same van!
So why this elaborate set up? If he wants to kill her, why doesn’t he just do it right away? Why keep her alive only to convince her she is dead and then kill her for real anyway?
Because as he explained, the people he regards as “dead” and that he wants to bury and get rid of are people who don’t value their life. Of course he intentionally selected Anna after having met her at the funeral of his previous victim and noticing that she is indeed like that and apparently doesn’t value her own life. But he couldn’t be completely sure until she says “I’m glad I’m dead. I’m glad it’s over”.
So that’s why he goes through this elaborate set up of making her believe she is already dead, because once she truly believes that, she will likely either embrace her death or will voice regret about having died (thus indicating that she still values her life). And she does voice regret and the willingness to change her life and that's when he himself unlocks the door for her and indicates to her that she is now free to leave and go back to her life.
What then follows is one of the few scenes in the movie where we do indeed see something that isn’t real and that is just in someone’s head, as she now imagines herself leaving and going back to her house where Paul and her mother and a bunch of literal witches are already waiting for her only to then cast her out and oppress her and silence her. Well, that’s what it symbolizes anyway as they are literally casting her out and chocking her, obviously symbolizing her fear of being rejected by Paul and her mother which she mentioned just moments earlier.
In response to her being afraid to leave, Deacon says: “I thought you were different. You all say you’re scared of death. But the truth is you’re more scared of life”. To which she responds with the aforementioned: “I’m glad I’m dead. I’m glad it’s over”. Thus sealing her fate in the eyes of Deacon.
Later she does realize that she is still alive after seeing her breath fogging a mirror and then she physically struggles against Deacon one final time, asking why he lied to her, but he just drugs her again, as in his eyes she already had her chance and already made her decision.
So (spoiler alert if it wasn’t already very much obvious) the real twist is actually the exact opposite of what LapCCP claims, as THROUGHOUT the ENTIRE movie she is actually very much alive (at least physically). Though at the very, very end, we do see her being buried alive and scratching from within at her own coffin so hard that her fingers bleed (again, corpses don’t scratch or bleed) reinforcing the fact that even at this point she is still very much alive.