Remember The Sixth Sense? That guessing game of creepy corpses, perceptive little children who don't see the Sun enough and a plot twist that kept viewers guessing ?til the closing credits.
Now just imagine that but with Christina Ricci?s nipples. That was fun, wasn?t it?
That’s the kind of Hollywood mindset that gets twisted tales like After.Life told, which?involve cold morticians chatting to the recently deceased body of Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci)…but is she really dead?
Probably.
Actually, probably not.
We don’t really want to spoil the fish-slap finish to this particularly overwrought story, but suffice to say that it’s more concerned with building the levels of intrigue to a near hemorrhage inducing state.
Things get off to a bumpy start, with Anna acting withdrawn and constantly bickering with her boyfriend, Paul (half geek, half hunk, all Justin Long), whose logical response is to propose marriage, quite bafflingly. Anna seems to be popping pills like Pez and seeing all manner of hallucinations.
It’s after one particularly ferocious argument with Paul that she makes the mistake of being in a car accident. What a daft git. The accident only goes and kills her…or does it?
Probably.
Maybe.
What’s for dinner?
This is the main crux of the movie and where menacing nose-face Liam Neeson turns up as Eliot Deacon, claiming to be able to communicate with the recently snuffed.
He’s actually?the big?advantage of the film, with the once Qui-Gon-Schindlers-Big-Bollocks proving to be a?sinister sod. He'says that he?is able to help the deceased move on to the other side…or can he?
Meh.
The rest of the film balances between Anna’s being dead. Or not. While her strange connection with some morbidly obsessed child may hold the answers,?her boyfriend?Paul ponders grief. It’s a dramatic change for the usually comedic Long, finding much emotional depth, more so than when he got a spanner to the balls in Dodgeball.
Ricci is also perfectly adequate playing the confuddled Anna, trying to work out what death means to her, not knowing whether she even had a life at all. It’s also a role that pretty much has her in the buff for the vast majority of the picture.
It’s not a complaint, but it’s just sort of…odd.
The film meanders on through its running time, throwing more nudity and gore (and for those inclined, sometimes simultaneously), while the resolution to Anna’s predicament and Eliot’s motivation are dragged out. The formula adds so many turns that by the end it begins to run stale.
The ending itself doesn’t quite pack the punch that you’d hope but the story itself is acted out with such conviction by the stellar three leads, that it’s sometimes just satisfying enough to watch everything play out. It’s a creepy tale, not one bursting with full-on horror, but if you’ve got a thing for?corpses, blood and?naked women, then this is probably for you.
Or you’re mental. Either way we want you?to stay away from us…or do we?