People in the Movie: Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, Justin Long
Director: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Pigeonhole: Horror (-ish)
The Basics: Anna Taylor’s (Ricci) life seems to be in a rut, and mistakenly believing her boyfriend Paul Coleman (Long) is about to dump her, she leaves a restaurant in a fury, gets into a car accident, and dies. Anna “wakes up” and begins talking to Eliot Deacon (Neeson), the mortician who is preparing her for interment. He explains he can communicate with the dead to assist them in their transition. Anna spends the movie at first denying she is even dead, then attempting to accept it. All is not what it seems, and Paul, convinced that something is amiss begins to look a little deeper at Anna’s death.
Recommendation: When all was said and done, I was disappointed. The cast is there, the story concept is there, but the on-screen product just failed to bring it together. There are a few serviceable elements that make it entertaining enough to give it a look. ‘R’ rating is for nudity and language, and a scene of sexuality.
My Take: Certain actors will draw me to a film, and with the three headliners I believed this film was worth a look. The story basics – a woman who is in a transition to the “after life” with the assistance of a kindly older man - seemed like a decent enough concept. I also think everyone has thought about to themselves at one time or another, “what will happen when I die?” Equally interesting is the notion of the person who can see or communicate with dead people, like Neeson’s character can supposedly do.
**spoiler alert** The clues that Deacon is executing a nefarious plan, rather than being a mild mannered, comforting funeral director, are not very subtle. He continually injects Anna with a fictional drug to make her appear to be dead, when outsiders come to look at her body. The fact that Anna can interact with objects in the physical world also somewhat of a give away, although there is good scene where she is holding a scalpel to Deacon’s throat, and she appears unable to stab him, making the audience question whether she is alive or dead (at least at that point). So, what we really have in this film is a serial killer on the rampage, mixed with the elements of a drama of people accepting loved one’s deaths.
I think if the director had firmly chose one direction or the other – either an intelligent serial killer mystery or a supernatural thriller involving a man who helped the recent dead in their journey – then the movie would have been much more satisfying. However, this movie felt like the director attempted to mix both, with oil and water results. We are revealed to elements of the serial killer story too easily, and then we are quickly led down a path of scenes and elements that attempt to take to audience down the supernatural road. It’s almost as if two storylines were haphazardly spliced together, and this, in my opinion, is what drug the movie down.
I will note that one element I thought was absolutely brilliant was the character of Jack (Chandler Canterbury). He is a student in Anna’s class, maybe 10-12 years old, with a noticeably bad home life. His mother appears to be near catatonia, and Jack is a bit of a social misfit. Jack sees Anna walking in the funeral home one night, after being informed she was dead. Jack asks Eliot about this, at which point Eliot begins to convince the boy that he also has the same ability to see and speak to the dead like Eliot does. Essentially a serial killer mentoring a new one. This is later highlighted when the audience later sees Jack burying a sick bird- still alive- in the ground, believing that he is helping the bird, just as Eliot has taught him. And I will state that if I was picking a “best performance” out of this movie, it would be Liam Neeson’s.
I think Justin Long did a fairly good job as the boyfriend; he does a nice roller coaster of handling Anna’s death with denial then acceptance then denial building into obsession that Deacon was keeping Anna alive at the funeral home. The end of the movie is actually quite fitting both Paul and Anna.
Final Thought/Extras/For Fun: Christina Ricci spends almost half of the movie nude… Kate Bosworth was originally cast as Anna…
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