After.Life

Director: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Starring: Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long
Review: 1 star (of five)

See how After.Life has a little dot there between its two words? Like India-dot-Arie, and anything-dot-com? That’s fresh. That sets it apart. It’s the very latest thing in … oh, wait, it’s not still 2002? I can say two good things about this movie: 1) Christina Ricci is an interesting actress even in a dull pile of stupid, and 2) this film did not directly murder anyone I love.

Here’s how stupid this boring movie is: Christina Ricci, after a car accident, wakes up on a slab in a funeral home, convinced she’s still alive, because she’s breathing and her body is moving and all that usual “I’m alive” stuff. Creepy funeral home director Liam Neeson explains that, no, she’s dead, and he’s just a guy with a gift for talking to the newly dead as they transition into the afterworld. He spends the rest of the movie trying to convince her she’s dead, and the movie tries to keep the question ambiguous for the audience. Okay, so over at least two and a half days of being kept locked in a basement morgue, she never gets hungry? She never wants a drink of water? The remarkably minor, but visible wounds she’s sporting, never hurt?

(There’s a thing with a muscle relaxant that either is preventing rigor mortis, or sedating a live Ricci, but that wouldn’t explain, in case she’s alive, why she’s never hungry or in pain when the drug wears off.)

Also, the film leaves more questions unanswered than answered. The question of whether Ricci is alive is definitively handled by the end of the flick. However, Ricci has at least two, arguably three, supernatural experiences that do not fit with the story’s logic.
And there’s a creepy little boy lifted out of “The Sixth Sense” who does nothing worthwhile to advance the plot, and yet he’s visible at least twice in Liam’s Polaroid montage of dead people (Neeson meets him; they don’t know each other), so that makes no sense. The film’s director and co-writer also seems to have no real idea how police departments and lawyers work, either, which is just one reason why Justin Long, as Ricci’s estranged love interest, contributes nothing to the film except a hearty, if unintentional laugh. At one point, in a moment of unforgivable self-pity, he slaps the annoying boy. I mean, he hauls off and smacks the kid so hard the boy falls to the floor. And calls him a “little fuck.” It’s a moment of horrific and real violence … that made a lot of my preview audience laugh at how ludicrously over-the-top and out of place it was.

This movie’s young director, Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, has no idea how to structure a story, layers on stupid symbolism (the film’s palette is washed out, but Ricci spends most of it in a bright red slip, her loving boyfriend’s car is red, etc.), and has Neeson deliver a smug warning, all but directly to the audience, to live their lives with passion, now … before it’s too late, and they too are dead. Deep.

The film squanders the talents of Neeson and Ricci, a great young actress whose ability to choose a script is deeply flawed, despite the occasional wonder like Black Snake Moan. She spends the first two-thirds of the film in a red slip, then the rest naked, symbolizing her character’s journey, and all I can say is, this was not the film to make that kind of commitment to.