After.Life (www.the-usher.com)

"I'm the only one who can hear you now"

After arguing with her boyfriend Paul (Long), Anna (Ricci) angrily gets behind the wheel of her car and heads home. Not concentrating on the road, she looks up to see a pair of headlights heading towards her. When she awakes she finds herself on the table of a funeral home, with mortician Eliot Deacon (Neeson) about to start work preparing for her funeral. Confused, terrified and feeling very much a live, Anna confronts Eliot only for him to reveal that he has a gift, and it is up to him to prepare her for the after life.

Death is the last great adventure everyone has to go through and Hollywood has been obsessed in explaining what happens when you pass away but can ‘After.Life’ prepare you for what happens next?

Blurring the line between your life on this Earth and what happens when you pass away has intrigued storytellers for as long as stories have been told. What happens after death is the biggest unanswered question that all of us face and Hollywood has embraced this question many times, with Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo having her turn. The question she asks is what happens if you die but you don’t know if you are dead or alive.

For ‘After.Life’, Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo has co-written and directed the story of a young woman who has supposed to have died in a road traffic, only to awake on the slab of a funeral director. He reveals that he has the ability to talk to the dead and help them come to terms with their death to prepare them for the other side. The problem is that Anna believes that she is still alive and thinks that the undertaker isn’t all that he appears to be. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is struggling to cope with her death and becomes convinced that she is in fact alive and been held captive in the funeral director’s cellar. Continually asking the question of the audience as to whether is alive or not, the plot twists and turns through to its conclusion.

Bringing the tale to life is an ensemble cast who try their best with their roles. Christina Ricci takes a riskier role for her as Anna, as she spends most of her character’s time on the slab naked but she struggles when the drama takes hold and she has to show real fear and emotion. The same can be said of Justin Long as her boyfriend Paul. Better known for his more comedic roles, he just seem at home in this more challenging drama, even though he does try to embrace these emotions. Liam Neeson is as good as ever, never really revealing whether he is actually a killer or in fact a man helping the dead to move on. It is the role of Chandler Canterbury as Jack however who needs to be questioned as he is clearly there to add a hint of ‘The Sixth Sense’ to the film.

With the use of the colour red prevalent throughout, clues thrown at you and then taken away and a conclusion that will leave you still asking the question as to whether Anna was dead or not, ‘After.Life’ is a good idea but one that is not that well executed.

Audio Commentary with Co-Writer/Director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Delving Into The AFTER.LIFE: The Art Of Making A Thriller
Theatrical Trailer

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2010