It is rather discouraging when you see a film that totally disappoints you, a film that completely lets you down. The Japanese film AfterLife is one of those films. It is a movie that seems to have a very compelling premise, but ends up being a mixture of some interesting bits, and some pure laziness.

The film seems to have a good idea. When people die, they are sent to a bureaucratic institution, in which the deceased are asked to say what their best and most pleasurable memory is. Once they decide on the memory, the employees of this office of the afterlife capture the memory on film. The deceased then watch the film, afterwards being sent to the great unknown where they live that memory for all eternity.

We are witness to a number of recently deceased people, telling their stories in a somewhat documentary fashion. These parts of the film are interesting, because we get a wide assortment of characters, all of whom are placed with the burden of choosing only one memory. Of course, we get middle-aged guys who talk endlessly about sex, some people who seem to believe their lives were quite boring, as well as some other sorts of people who actually have more happier memories.

We also get to know the employees of this strange business. Their lives seem to be a sort of burden, as it consists almost entirely of interviewing, and investigating, the newly deceased. The environment that they live in is quite dour, which is, I suppose, understandable, since they supposedly don’t live on Earth. There is some intrigue amongst this group of people, however. Much of the intrigue involves a young man and a young woman. Both of them find themselves in situations where they can easily manipulate the people they are assigned to. The young woman has a case of a young girl whose favorite memory is, at first, a trip to Disneyland. The worker tells her in private that she’s the thirtieth person in the last year who chose that situation -- obviously implying that she would like to see this young girl pick something more original. The young man has a case of an old man, whose deciding on which memory to pick. In this case, as well, the young man finds himself in a tricky spot, but I won’t discuss this part further, because it involves a very intriguing secret involving the young man.

While this film doesn’t make it explicit, the young man and woman are obviously close. They’re friends, but the actions of the young woman later on in the film suggest that she has stronger feelings for him. The fact that the film doesn’t make this too overblown is certainly a unique change from works that always have to have an overbearing romantic angle.

But...... it was one particular moment, one particular shot, that totally destroyed what possible intrigue this film could have had for me. There is a shot in which the female worker leaves the building, allegedly to scout locations for the filming of the memories, but, in actuality, is just distraught, and needs to mope about for a while. She wanders around the shrubbery and the woodland around the building. Fine. And then, after that, she wanders around the city. The city???? I thought that we were supposed to be in some sort of purgatory -- yet here is a woman, who in an earthly sense is supposed to be dead, wandering around what looks to be downtown Tokyo. And there’s no trick or spin on this -- she’s just wandering around the city, in a montage that is typical of a normal film in which a character wanders aimlessly within a disinterested populace in a large city, while the camera follows her.

It was at about this point that I realized that the director (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Maborosi) had put no imagination into making the film’s “unique world” come alive for the audience. Not for a moment did I believe that this movie took place anywhere other than the planet Earth, which is pretty fatal when the movie is supposed to concern the afterlife. The fact is, before this, we just got some pretty dusty and dour office space, along with some nice shots of the winter landscape around the building. Not exactly high-tech, but that was fine... I didn’t really expect this film to be a sci-fi, and it’s not. If the film remained here, we could have agreed that, whatever, or wherever, this place was, it was separate from the rest of the world. But once the woman found herself in the city, the spell was broken. The film doesn’t explain anything -- not a thing. Why?????

The fact that the whole world of the afterlife was not well-thought out, also made me realize that the premise itself wasn’t all that incredible either. It sounds like the creation of a totally insular film guy to have a film crew recreate the special memories of the dead -- not exactly a whole lot of otherworldly magic, is there?

There’s a movie called Defending Your Life, directed by and starring Albert Brooks, also starring Meryl Streep and Rip Torn, which, even though this is an American comedy, is amazingly similar, in that it, too, tries to depict a unique vision of the afterlife. In that film, Brooks finds himself dead, and in an afterlife that resembles the comforts of the upper-middle classes, with a squeaky-clean hotel, and a continental breakfast that contains no calories, tastes the best, and will never make you full. As well, the purpose of Brooks’ afterlife trip is to be evaluated on his past life. If a person is seen as able to rise above the petty concerns and self-indulgence of humanity, that person is moved to a higher level of existence. If that person fails the test, they are sent back to earth to live the same life over again.

Defending Your Life was far more successful, because it actually bothered to create a convincing otherworldly waiting station for the next life, and make us halfway believe it. The film managed to create a lot of laughs and satire in depicting this odd situation (like the hotel TV’s weather channel, that always has the same pleasant forecast 24 hours a day), and the life-evaluation is a lot more meaningful than the rather self-indulgent premise of AfterLife.

Say what you will about American films, but sometimes, they understand that it’s better to be wittier, faster-paced, and accessible than to be slow, flimsy, and artsy without purpose.

Overall, I thought that AfterLife was a pretty lazy effort. There were some good bits, and bits that had potential, but I just wasn’t able to believe in this movie. I came into this movie expecting something powerful, but at the end, it was empty. What a shame!

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above