AfterDeath

More Questions Than Afters

AfterDeath
UK 2015
Directed by Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt
FrightFest presents.../Icon DVD Region 2

AfterDeath is an interesting movie and, for the most part, a quite effective one. It starts where another film’s twist ending might actually be the big reveal but here it’s the set up. We begin the movie with the realisation that the five central protagonists (the entire cast not counting the ‘voice’ of a demon) are actually all dead.

The movie kicks off with Robyn (played by Miranda Raison) waking at night to find herself washed up on a beach. She flees the sands because she is chased by some fairly aggressive smoke monster thingies and arrives in a cottage. Inside she finds three of the other five actors in the film engaged in a ménage à trois on the couch. They are Sam Keely as the truly unlikeable Seb, Elarica Johnson as Patricia and Lorna Nickson Brown as Livvy. After an exchange, of sorts, she finds the fifth of this group (including herself), Onie, played by Daniella Kertesz, trying to slice up her own wrists but, alas, no blood and no death. She is informed that they are all dead and this leads to Robyn throwing out the most hilarious and sardonic line of the film about what the others did when they discovered they were dead and in some kind of afterlife limbo... “so you thought... threesome”.

It’s an ‘afterlife’ then, which we have here but, it’s not the ‘afterlife’ our main protagonists, all of whom perished in a fire at a night club, were expecting. As the movie goes on, they try to discover the rules of their predicament, as they are obviously not in heaven and they are not entirely certain they are in hell. It’s interesting because, last year I saw a film at the cinema called A Ghost Story (reviewed here) where the audience can slowly put together the rules and vocabulary of the haunted limbo world from observing the environment of one of the main characters. Here, though, it’s a slightly different kettle of fish because these five people need to find out what’s going on and why they are in a cottage which is familiar to each of them (not saying any more than that, don’t want to post any spoilers) and how they get out of there. Especially since, at regular intervals, the unreachable lighthouse in the distance shines on them and brings a burst of pain into their lives. Also, why does one of their number keep disappearing at the drop of a hat, only to reappear again a little later. And what are these wretched smoke monsters all about?

Robyn is the most determined to find out what the hell is going on and tries to steer the rag tag group towards some kind of logical escape plan... leading us through the usual antagonistic response scenes, the bonding scenes... and so forth. All the leads are pretty cool in this and as the film goes on, a little more is revealed about each character and things start to make a little more sense.

It is, it has to be said, a one trick pony of an idea (which I suspect I also might have said about A Ghost Story and that was awesome)... but the writing, direction and performances are such that the mystery behind the shrinking universe they find themselves inhabiting (without giving anything relevant away there) doesn’t get too old and the premise never really begins to flag until the last quarter of an hour or so of the film. By this point, perhaps, the ending is fairly obvious in terms of the various paths it could take but even by then the dialogue is still quite spiky and the last line of the film is especially irreverent and bound to wind up, I suspect, a certain cross-section of the audience.

Also, for a cheaply budgeted British horror film, I was surprised at just how effective and realistic the moving smoke demons in this one were. I tend to hate a lot of the more obvious CGI moments in movies and am always the first to criticise them but the special effects here seemed really good to me so... yeah, congratulations to a horror film for even getting me to mention them.

Not much else to say about Afterdeath but, like a lot of the FrightFest presents movies put out by Icon, I would say this one would work best as one film out of a screening of many (which is how it would have originally been seen at FrightFest, I guess) rather than something you watch on its own. Definitely a good movie for one of the middle ingredients of a private horror all-nighter and with the cheap price of the FrightFest DVDs at the moment, definitely worth a purchase if you are a fan of theologically themed horror movies. I’ve seen similar ‘people trapped in a puzzle’ stories filmed with far less panache and imagination over the years than this one.