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After.Life

Written by Zombie Boy

Tuesday, 06 April 2010 04:06

Reviewing Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's feature film debut is almost as difficult for me as trying to pronounce her name. It deals with matters of life and death, quite literally, but between the script and the execution it has as many weaknesses as it does strengths. Wojtowicz-Vosloo has an amazing eye for visuals, and the film boasts an excellent cast and a superb sound design...so why didn't I like it more? Hard to say. I'm going to go ahead and outline the plot and then talk about some of the details - while trying not to get too spoilery - and we'll see if we can figure out where such a wonderful idea went wrong.

School teacher Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) and her lawyer boyfriend, Paul (Justin Long), should have an incredible life. They're each good looking, with satisfying careers, and most importantly, each other. But for some reason, they just can't make it work. Paul has a bit of a temper, but the bigger problem is Anna's detachment from the relationship. In a very Pagliacci moment at the beginning of the film, Paul asks her through the shower door if she is happy. She answers yes, while her face clearly says no...which is better than the on the nose visual from the preceding scene, where Paul is pumping away on top of Anna, while she lies there like, can you guess? Yeah, a corpse. Paul makes the comment, "I just want us to be happy again," and that, combined with the nosebleed Anna has in the shower, gives us a tantalizing morsel to chew on, imagining what tragic moment caused the rift between the two.

Moving forward, we get even more evidence that something might be wrong with Anna. At the elementary school where she teaches, she has a panic attack in a hallway as the lights systematically go out. She runs towards a large double-door framed by a bright white light shining through the top and bottom and sides. The first of several "white-light tunnel" images we will see in the film. She then needs to stop at a pharmacy to have a suspicious prescription filled, suspicious because her first thought upon reaching her car, after her panic, is to take a pill. Then, on her way to the funeral of her old piano teacher, she makes the incongruous and impromptu decision to have her hair colored red first. This symbolism is lost on me, other than giving us the second of three deliberate images of red fluid swirling down a drain (the first time being the shower nosebleed).

I'm alive...

By this point we have already seen mortician Eric Deacon (Liam Neeson) at work, speaking soothingly to a corpse and consoling a living loved one. So when Anna shows up for the funeral and it is at Deacon's funeral home, your Spider-Sense should start tingling like mad. And Lo and Behold, after Paul's intended marriage proposal goes totally wrong, like everything else for the fractured couple, and Anna speeds off into the night and straight into a horrible car crash, it is no surprise when she wakes up on Deacon's very own mortuary table. Unable to move anything but her head, and that only barely, she is shocked to be informed that she is dead. Deacon tells her that he has the unique gift of speaking to the dead, and she needs to come to terms with her mortality and make peace with it. Naturally she has a problem with this, and the cat and mouse game begins.

In the meantime, Paul wakes up quite unaware of what has happened. It seems that Anna's mother, whom Paul referred to as crazy during his last fight with Anna, is a heartless, embittered old crone who takes pleasure in Paul's chagrin at not knowing where Anna is, and further sadistic pleasure it not only telling him the news, but insinuating it was his fault. When Paul is blue-balled during his attempts to see Anna at the funeral home, he starts to come apart at the seams. He begins drinking too much and having visual and auditory hallucinations of Anna. He makes increasingly desperate attempts at gaining access to Anna's body, and only serves to make himself look crazier to the people around him.

And thus we have a movie. The marketing for this film plays up the mystery aspect, as in: is Anna really dead and under the auspices of a sympathetic psychic mortician, or is she alive and the prisoner of a sick serial killer? This is unfortunate, as it really is not what the movie is about. Or at least I don't think it is. And anyway, it isn't really much of a mystery. One of the things that disappointed me about the film is its total lack of revelations. Not only do we not ever find out what the catalytic event for the descent of Anna and Paul's relationship was, but we likewise never learn what the pills and the nosebleed were all about. And having the film move in a strictly linear fashion, from plot point A to plot point B, defuses any possible mystery. If your eyes are open, you will never have a second of hesitation about what is happening.

...I'm dead...

Anna and Paul should have character arcs of self-discovery, but they really don't. Paul deteriorates, but never makes a damned decision. He gets forceful, but as soon as he meets any resistance at all he deflates. For her part, Anna goes from mildly dissenting to half-hearted escape attempts to acceptance and finally to a bland and hackneyed soliloquy on her inability to love. Maybe they are both narratively sound for what Wojtowicz-Vosloo meant for the characters, but it is hardly satisfying as a viewer to get a) no revelations and b) no strong climactic ending.

...I'm the stranger...

There is also Jack, one of Anna's students. I am still not sure what his role in the story was meant to be. He gives Paul a pertinent piece of information, which Paul of course immediately wastes, and then Jack becomes sort of a ward of Deacon, another plot point that peters out into nothing. It does serve to give us an insight into Deacon's character, but it is an insight that we pretty much already knew, and is one of the few things in the film that would have been better left unsaid. Also, Jack's mother is a loose end that bothered me. She stares at the television like a zombie, decidedly corpse-like, but she does turn around and look at Jack once, so she is clearly alive. More subtlety that I missed, assuredly.

Wojtowicz-Vosloo's direction is also not consistent. The characters' motivations are all strong in individual scenes, but they don't make linear sense when viewed as a whole. I just never had a clear sense why they made the decisions that they did, from scene to scene. That being said, Wojtowicz-Vosloo does have a distinct visual style, and the movie is quite beautiful to look at. The juxtaposition of Deacon's anachronistic funeral home with the modern outside world is jarring in a good way, sort of Hammer meets Cronenberg. Visual cues such as the white-light doorways and the pebbled-glass shower door between Paul and Anna are nice touches, and she has the good grace to now that the pace of the film needed more static camera shots and not Raimi-esque winging around (which is what some filmmakers do because they think it makes them look "stylized").

Also, as I stated earlier, I loved the sound design of the film. The bombastic foley work is a fitting counterpoint to the somberness of most of the piece. Anna and Deacon have a quiet conversation about life and death, but when he inserts his key into the lock that keeps Anna in her sterile room it clicks with a finality that cannot be escaped. And of course a slammed door will knock you out of your seat.

I guess what it all boils down to is that it is a beautiful and well-made film that I did not understand. Anna and Paul must make discoveries about themselves and take more control of their lives, to live instead of just being alive, while Deacon seems to stand apart from them as omniscient judge. But instead I found Deacon's role in the film perfunctory, showing up in a scene, dispensing some lines, and then leaving, while Anna mostly looks around like a scared doe and Paul acts like Bukowski drinking lite beer. There were all these brightly-colored threads hanging in my face, but the film just never weaved them together.