Neeson in Dublin

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never had it fallen flat.  --James Joyce, The Dead

Perhaps Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo was attempting to do something more ambitious with After.Life than what she could deliver, but it is to her credit that I see things in her feature film that echo my undergraduate studies of the early Modernists, things that recall Eliot's grasp for an existence made inert through anesthesia, or Joyce's ability to show a mode of living entirely paralyzed. We have seen such things before. Virtually everyone with the ability to operate a video camera uses a nose bleed to suggest something sinister is afoot in the transient netherworld. We are not told why Ricci's middle school teacher has a bleed, uses meds, or why the mother behaves like a shellfish with a claw attached to your finger. We do not see Liam's Deacon at the initial crash site, and don't know how he gets his victims out of the ER, or why he can fool the doctors so readily with a muscle paralytic. We do not quite need to know these things for the narrative to work better than it does, but Justin Long, scion of Jeepers Creepers the first, is not up to pitting himself against Neeson's absolute and short tempered faith. Long's on and off panic switch is as much static as Ricci's desperate phone call. I am still waiting for little Ricci to inhabit a role I can believe in, her complicity in Monster aside, and I am not entirely clear on Canterbury's Jack. An apprentice, yes, but Wojtowicz seems to want him to stand as an ambiguous observer whose conscience is finally swayed.

More than suspense, Agnieszka seemed to be aiming for suspension, asking us how we live inside the routine entrapments we fear changing: There is the promise of more potential within the failure.