Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life” presents a thought provoking setup. After the moment of your death, you arrive in what looks like an old school or office building. There you stay for a week; you must use your time there to reflect upon your life and select one single memory to take into the afterlife with you. That particular memory will be restaged, filmed and you’ll watch it in a small cinema. Then you leave the place, moving on to – something. Not hell. Maybe heaven.
“After Life” is a quiet film filled with interesting characters, some of whom participate actively in the memory selection process while others defy the ideas as whole. Unexpected relationships emerge, but not, as would be in a lesser film, a definite romantic ideal. The use of music is minimal and unobtrusive. Some of the images, such as one of the workers looking for locations in a bamboo forest and then in the city, are surprisingly mesmerising. Kore-eda manages to avoid potential pitfalls; we are not shown the filmed memories, for they are not ours to see.
Intelligent and in its way realistic, “After Life” is a metaphysical meditation from one of the proclaimed foremost figures of New Japanese Cinema.
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