After.Life Review

Messages: The movie attempts a message about learning to live and appreciate one's life, but it's at once too simplistic and too muddled. Characters say how they want to be happy or want to find love, but no one seems to know how to accomplish these things.

Role models: Most of the movie's characters are not admirable people. The funeral director Eliot Deacon is perhaps the most polite, but he's also impatient and unforgiving. Anna is rather chilly and cold-hearted and her boyfriend Paul is prone to fits of violence and drinking. Even the little boy, Jack, who may or may not have the power to speak to the dead, reveals a cruel streak.

Violence: Aside from some verbal assaults, some blood, and some mild car crashes, the movie has a very strong, negative mood of death, with images of dead bodies and decay, as well as some ghosts and gory visions. Anna wields a pair of scissors as a potential weapon, but does not use them. Worst of all, a grown-up strikes an 11-year-old child across the face.

Sex: Anna appears naked often in this movie, but mostly as a "corpse" in the basement of a funeral parlor. When she's not naked, she wears a sexy red negligee. She appears naked in the shower twice, once in silhouette, and once as part of a gory nightmare. In one scene, she and her boyfriend Paul have passionless, troubled sex in bed, with a glimpse of Anna's breasts.

Language: We hear strong language throughout, including multiple uses of "f--k" and "s--t." There is also "jack off" (used as an insult), "God," (as an exclamation), "Goddamn," "asshole," "hell," and "piss."

Consumerism: Not an issue

Drinking, drugs and smoking: Anna pops prescription pills, and Paul drinks (wine and whiskey) to overindulgence when upset. They both drink and drive. Eliot Deacon gives Anna several injections to "relax her muscles."