What exactly happens when we die? Director Hirokazu Kore-eda paints an oddly low-key and mundane picture where the dead make a weeklong stopover at a quaint little office. After Life deals with one particular week, when twenty-two new “customers” arrive, and each one sits down for an interview with an employee. In this stopover, the dead are only allowed a single, specific memory from their life to take into the next, while they forget every other experience. The employees allow a couple days for the deceased to choose and recount their memory in extreme detail, and this one memory is recreated and filmed by the staff as a short movie to be screened on the last day of the week. After viewing their memories, the dead pass on to the next stage, forever reliving it.
The true ingenuity of After Life comes from the unique premise and the sheer simplicity of the storytelling. While typical cinematic musings on the afterlife tend to require elaborate sets, dramatics and surreal imagery, After Life is refreshingly pragmatic, as if this center for the dead could be a next-door neighbor. The film begins with a (perhaps too) slow pace, consisting of many unique interviews of the recently deceased, each one memorable in its own right.
Kore-eda also crafts the film without an ounce of pretension or sentimentality. Everything looks just as it does in the real world and the employees seem to be normal people doing their jobs. With simple direct dialogue and camera work, Kore-eda takes us through every detail of the painstaking process as the employees write a script and account for sound, lighting, temperature and every little realistic element to the customer’s memory. The viewer follows along as the employees travel to bamboo forests and the city to record the appropriate sound effects. For one particular man, whose memory is one of flying through clouds in a small plane, the employees blow fog through a fan while moving puffy white cotton on lines past the static, model plane and he delights in the realism.
Along with the number of deceased characters and their stories, the viewer gets brief looks at employees’ personalities and pasts. One employee is somehow connected to a customer in this particular batch of deceased, while a relationship between two employees seems to be going on in the background. Viewers might find it difficult to emotionally connect to these characters, but ending revelations turn this one apparent writing misstep into a brilliant choice. Wry humor, inter-office politics, the daily meetings and stressful assignments capture the best qualities of the film.
By skipping all the frills and wonders of the afterlife, the film manages to feel more realistic and thus have a greater emotional effect. Kore-eda’s world conjures up logical questions for the viewer about what heaven may be, or who the mysterious employees are, but satisfying answers are always within reach-- After Life often gives its audience exactly what it needs. Except perhaps more Susumu Terajima. Audiences could always use more Susumu Terajima.
Reviewed by Tarun
