GRADE: 9
After death, people have just one week to choose only a memory to keep for eternity.
Original Title: Wandafuru raifu
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Country of Origin: Japan
Thoughts:
Despite the synopsis of the plot, there’s nothing ethereal about After Life; rather it presents its waystation between death and eternity as a fairly dreary office environment where people are merely doing their job as best they can. It’s exactly this mundanity, though, that allows the ideas of the film to take centerstage. Koreeda is chiefly concerned with memory—what matters to us, how we hold on to it, how its meaning, and even its details, evolve over time. Simultaneously the film serves as an exploration of movie-making and how we grasp to capture the ineffable on film in order to cement it in our minds. It’s a terrific movie that balances big and complex ideas with a gentle humanism and humor.