After.Life
After.Life is an exciting, creepy, and extremely suspenseful “adult” horror film -; it unnerves because we really cannot be sure what is taking place. What we do know is that whatever is happening to Anna (Christina Ricci) is unhealthy and frightening. This is the first feature film by Agnieszka Wojtowitcz-Vosloo, a young director who made a successful short film in graduate school and held out to produce her own script when the opportunity finally arose. She has created a psychological thriller that is carefully crafted and plays on primal fears of life and death with an exceptionally assured sense of film style and storytelling.
The plot begins with a funeral director named Eliot (Liam Neeson) who seems to have a running dialogue with a dead man as he takes his picture with an old Polaroid camera. Then we meet Paul (Justin Long) and Anna in bed. Whatever excitement she has felt for him has long disappeared and Paul can’t hide his disappointment. They are an unhappy couple and things will soon get worse -; especially for Anna who has a nosebleed in the shower and seems to be overtaken by an indefinable sense of dread and sadness. As a teacher she helps a young student named Jack (Chandler Canterbury) when he is bullied-;only to be repaid with a panic attack triggered by an ominous shutting down of lights in a dark school corridor that he may have caused.
At the funeral of her former piano teacher she is unnerved when his lips seem to move-;a moment not lost on Eliot, who hovers close to her. Soon she colors her hair red, sending swirls of blood-like liquid cascading down the drain. She shows up late for dinner with Paul, who has waited patiently with an engagement ring and hopeful look on his face. But it goes badly-;he dismisses her red hair and she rushes off before he ever gets to the ring, leaving him pleading his case in the rain like a water-soaked puppy.
Something has to give-;unfortunately for Anna it may be her life. She crashes into an oncoming truck and we next see her laid out on the same coroner’s slab, immobile with a deep gash in her forehead. Eliot leans closer and closer. He is not surprised at all when Anna opens her eyes and asks “Where am I?”. Without missing a beat he tells her surprising news-;she’s dead.
The premise of After.Life—that when we “die” we may not be quite gone—resonates because it can never be proven or discounted. What if there is an experience between life and death where we remain conscious, in which we struggle to both understand and accept the process. Even worse, someone might have control over us as we lay helpless but not necessarily lifeless. Wojtowitcz-Vosloo weaves this idea through a stylish film and locks us into Anna’s plight. The film is designed meticulously, every location is chosen, constructed, lit and shot for a purpose-;Anna’s angry, wheelchair bound mother’s apartment is large, cold and green, like an old abandoned museum. The same green covers the walls of the expansive room that Anna and the other corpses are prepared in. The stone funeral parlor is dark, filled with purple and brown, a lifeless mansion of heavy wood and old rotary phones that seems from another era. The red dye that colored Anna’s hair early in the film fills the troughs of the coroner’s slab, flowing like blood, as Eliot washes it out. Anna’s red slip matches the blood red color of Paul’s SUV-;and the last time they saw each other he spilled blood red wine on his white shirt. As Anna comes to grips with her strange new reality the film intercuts shots of deadly coroner’s cutting tools being cleaned and prepared for use. There is a deadline that ratchets up the anxiety as she tries to escape; within a few days she will be buried-;whether alive, dead or somewhere in between.
Wojtowitcz-Vosloo masterfully manipulates the conventions of horror and thriller genres. There are nightmare scenes in which the dead seem to give Anna messages. When Eliot leaves one evening he forgets to take the house keys and she is able to leave the basement room and enter the huge funeral parlor. Her attempts to escape are intercut with Eliot rushing back to try to stop her-;and with his pursuit of her through the house. More than once she seems almost saved, including a truly unnerving scene with a policeman who enters the room where she is being held and may suspect that something is wrong. There is also an unhealthy mentoring relationship in which Eliot seems to be giving young Jack the tools to become his own monster.
The film is both original and indebted to the influences of suspense and horror-;the showerhead in Paul’s apartment, prominent in a nightmare he has about Anna, is clearly modeled on the shower scene in Psycho. Many of the compositions suggest the symmetry and deliberate framing of Stanley Kubrick’s films-;in one sequence Anna clutches a knife, waiting for her pursuer in clear homage to Shelley Duvall’s ordeal in The Shining.
After.Life is a treat for the mind and the emotions-;it scares and satisfies but also gives plenty to think about. It’s the rare film that you might want to see again just for the pleasure and fright of it.
Thomas W. Campbell
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