‘After.Life’: The walking dead

Here comes a horror film that tries to harness one of the most quintessential human fears of all: the fear of death, and the fear that we’ll still be conscious even when our heart stops beating. And yes, that means that we’ll be able to see everyone while we ourselves are invisible. The problem in this film though, which obviously was set out to be the film’s key point of playing with the minds of the viewers, is whether this after life consciousness is real or whether it is just in the mind of a troubled mortician. By the end of this film, we will never know which reality is correct, and in some films while you can get away with this oscillation, in this film things just don’t make sense since there isn’t enough weight to the story.

It’s one of those small American towns where everyone knows each other, the landscape is dismal and it seems like its winter here all year around. School teacher Anna (Ricci) is experiencing serious depression -- we’re never really told why despite some hints about her mentally unstable mother’s lack of love. Anna’s so depressed that she takes it out on her clueless, corporate boyfriend Paul (Justin Long who never deprives us of his droopy expression). Paul, despite Anna’s wretchedness, still loves her, but on the night that he will propose to her Anna begins another fight, leaves the restaurant in a hurry and gets herself killed in a car accident.

But is she really dead? She ends up on the table of mortician Deacon (Liam Neeson who is in so many movies this year that it’s hard to keep count). If she’s really dead then how can she talk with Deacon? Walk around in his lab and make phone calls? Deacon is fed up with Anna, and all the other cadavers he has to deal with. “You people, you just can’t let go!” Neeson here is the ultimate grim reaper with the sardonic attitude; in fact he’s so good they should have made the movie only about him.

Paul, for some reason, also doesn’t believe that Anna is completely dead. He sees her in his dreams, on the street; he even thinks he hears her voice. And what about Anna’s young student Jack, who also sees her? Deacon tells Jack that he’s got a rare gift -- please call Ghost Whisperer Jennifer Love-Hewitt for advice. Or maybe, Jack and Deacon share the same kind of schizophrenia, since Jack has a mother at home who is as good as dead as she stares at the TV all day long. What’s happening here? Is Anna the figment of some people’s imagination or is she some kind of ghost?

The film, with its psychological and cinematic tricks, keeps us on the edge of our seats with this very “important” question throughout its running time. There’s no denying that director Wojtowicz-Vosloo subjects us to some incredibly creepy shots of a dark valley that seems like purgatory and uses Deacon’s funeral home as the ultimate location of the film’s emotional uncertainty. Ricci’s porcelain features and natural fair skin duly emphasizes the connotations of gothica, and if you’ll remember her in “The Addams Family” you might think that this role is a natural extension of her moroseness as Wednesday Addams.

The real question that the director should ask herself is why should we really care about Anna’s miserable entrapment in the afterlife? She was miserable before, and she is just as miserable now. Neeson knows it and despite his own fed-up attitude tries to help her. Even her boyfriend knows it, since it is his feelings of guilt that keep her apparition terrorizing him.