FrightFest: After.Life

Playing in the small discovery screen and making its UK premiere was director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s After.Life, asking the question: where is the line between life and death?

After an argument with her boyfriend (Justin Long), Anna (Christina Ricci) drives away angry, tears blurring her vision and not paying attention to the road. A shriek later, Anna wakes up to find Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson), the local funeral director, preparing her body for burial. Naturally Anna doesn’t believe she’s dead and the audience is left to decide for itself. Deacon claims he can communicate with the dead but even Anna’s boyfriend Paul suspects Deacon isn’t what he appears to be.

What’s confusing about this film is the amount of unanswered questions. The audience is introduced to Anna, a depressed school teacher who seems to be losing interest in her boyfriend. While in the shower her nose bleeds: Why? Who knows. When leaving school the lights go out in the otherwise deserted corridor behind her: Why? No idea. Does she really die in the car accident? You’ll have to make up your own mind.

Moving onto Deacon, the lonely funeral director who claims to be able to talk to the deceased: he does appear to have inside knowledge of the dead people he buries, illustrated by his knowledge of one person’s favourite flower. But when Paul tries to get help from the police, they mention a chemical that can slow down the breathing and heart rate and create the appearance of death. Cut to the next scene and Deacon is injecting Anna with the same stuff. What is it that Anna sees in the fogged-up mirror that causes her to exclaim that Deacon had lied to her?

There is a lack of rules for the dead which also suggests they aren’t actually dead. If Anna is dead, how can she touch and move objects, even going so far as to trash Deacon’s equipment. How can she breathe; misting a mirror when she looks at her reflection? How can she cry if her blood no longer circulates and her body is already decomposing? If Deacon is the only one to see Anna as she truly is, why did Paul hear her when she managed to phone him? And why, oh why will Deacon not let Paul see Anna’s dead body?

Coming out of After.Life, we’re still asking, where is the line between life and death?

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