After.Life (2009)

A young woman, fleeing from a break up with her longtime boyfriend, ends up in a head on collision with a truck. The next time we see her, she's on a mortician's slab, being clinically disrobed in preparation for burial. Suddenly, the woman's eyes open and she asks where she is. The mortician, without batting an eye, calmly informs her that she's in a funeral home - she was in a car accident. She's dead. The young woman attempts to get off of the slab, but finds herself in a paralyzed state, unable to move and held fast as the mortician cleans her wounds and continues to calm her in a low, monotone voice that brooks no argument to his words. He even shows her a death certificate - it all sounds pretty convincing, right?

The main idea in After.Life is trying to figure out whether the main character, Anna (played by Christina Ricci), is alive or dead. The very fact that she's moving around onscreen would probably be enough to convince the viewer that she's got a beating pulse, but funeral director Eliot (Liam Neeson) seems to have an explanation for every question. For one, he's the only person who can see her as she is now - he's the only one who can see her soul, can speak to her and help her adjust to her death in order to move on. Neeson definitely plays up the charming sociopath, quickly growing exasperated with Anna's attempts to escape the funeral home and denials of what he attempts to convince her are the facts.

A man just doing a job...or something a little more sinister?

It honestly might have behooved the creators of After.Life to hold off of focusing on  Eliot in the opening of the film, simply to give him a greater air of mystery because it somewhat gives away the idea of whether or not he's the serial killer he seems to be. After all, he's positioned quite well to both receive, incapacitate, and eventually dispatch his victims as he sees fit. Ricci plays the damsel in distress well, the walls of the funeral home acting as the veil between the living and the dead that keep her and boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) apart. There's a lot of visual metaphor going on here - the use of light and dark to represent life and death, red against stark white to feel apathetic and removed like how one might be treated in a hospital environment, and the previously mentioned use of the building itself.

Red on white, for that cold, medical feel.

The message behind the film can also be analyzed to remark on how the majority of people move through their lives - just going through the motions, being alive because that's what you do. Eliot feels it necessary to remove these people from existence, to give them the end they so obviously crave. Whether this is a noble mission or more justification for his sociopathic tendicies is something else that is left up for the audience to decide, but it certainly is a relevant idea: how many people really live their lives? How many of us are popping pills to make us feel a certain way? How many of us are unhappy? Finding things to identify with in films are often what makes them more memorable, and After.Life certainly hits home in that department. And once you're confronted with that idea - that you've not been living up to your fullest potential - would you fight for another chance?

Sounds a bit like Saw.

The final climax of the film certainly isn't a letdown, though whether it provides the desired answers to the questions that the movie poses is another thing entirely. After.Life certainly attempts to be a subtle film, giving vague clues that point the viewer in the correct direction. It's my thought that, in the end, the creators attempt to leave this film open for the viewers to decide what's the truth - if  Eliot really is a serial killer working in a funeral home, or if he truly can speak to the dead and just happens to be incredibly creepy by keeping a cabinet full of photographs of his "patrons". Even with its flaws, After.Life is a unique film for someone who's looking for a little brain exercise with their entertainment.