User Reviews

As the story begins, we are taken to an ideal bucolic setting that ends in what might be a lake. A boy and a girl are playing in a dock. The little girl steps on a loose board and gets trapped. She begins screaming while the boy goes running to get help. As the boy goes to cross the highway, he is struck by an oncoming car. This scene holds the key to perhaps understanding the mystery posed by the creators of this complex film.

Without explanation we are taken to a Manhattan plush conference room where Nathan, a successful lawyer is hearing a colleague present a case which the firm might be interested in taking. It involves a suit against an airline where several family members have died in the Caribbean due to negligence. Nathan does not quite agree with the presentation and decides it is not for the firm.

At this time, an enigmatic man, who claims to be a Dr. Kay, arrives to speak with Nathan. The doctor watches Nathan while he puts sugar in his coffee; he is shocked by the amount of sugar the lawyer uses, so he warns him about possible health risks, something that is dismissed. The nature of Dr. Kay's visit is not immediately known, but the effect of his visit will linger in Nathan's mind and it will disturb him deeply. It is obvious Dr. Kay has come as some sort of messenger to warn about an impending doom, which is hard to understand.

Nathan's life will be greatly transformed as he learns more about Dr. Kay's message. He is shocked when the doctor asks him to accompany to watch a horrible scene in a subway station. Kay also tells him about a lady who Nathan used to know and her impending demise. Dr. Kay also points to other matters that must be seen to in Nathan's own life, like the strange relationship between Nathan and Claire, his former wife. We get to know about the personal tragedy in their life and finally Nathan is told about why he has been chosen by Dr. Kay in what will be his own mission in life.

"Afterwards" is not an easy film to grasp, yet there are rewards for the viewer that pays close attention to what really is underneath of what surfaces on the screen. Directed by Gilles Bourdos, and based on a novel "Et apres", which we never read, with Mr. Bourdos and Michel Spinosa's adaptation of the original material. The film is gorgeously photographed by Pin Bing Lee with an original musical score by Alexandre Desplat, a man with an excellent taste in whatever project he decides to undertake. The film was shot in different locales going from Quebec, to Manhattan to New Mexico.

Romain Duris, a versatile French actor, is at the center of the film playing Nathan. In his first assignment for an English language movie, this amazing actor shows why he is one of the most interesting personalities working today. John Malkovich appears as Dr. Kay, the enigmatic man with a mission. Canadian beauty Evangeline Lilly is fine as Claire.

Just saw this movie and the main selling point was Malkovich in the cast. He was fine, as was the female lead played by Evangeline Lilly. The main thing that did this movie in for me was a rather leaden performance from Romain Duris. The basic plot is that Malkovich is a "messenger" or someone who can foretell people's deaths. He is also a doctor working with dying people. He contacts Duris and, for the greater part of the movie, the audience is lead to believe that Duris is destined to die. Needless to say, this isn't the way the movie plays out. The director (or writer) manages to establish a dull, plodding rhythm to the film which is confusing and distracting. No more info for anyone interested in seeing the film and the film is worth a rental, if only to watch and revel in another quirky performance from Malkovich and a great performance from Evangeline Lilly. The main problem is it's difficult to empathize, sympathize or otherwise ize with Duris who has the emotional range of a rock in this film.

This film is dealing with death in the most surprising way possible.

After Ray Kurzweil and all his consorts who pretend that in a few years we will be full of nano-robots that will make us eternal because death is a tragedy we have to get rid of, we have the spreading of Tibetan Buddhism that is founded on its famous Book of the Dead and the rebirth theory and there the tragedy becomes a drama, a melodrama even, a Broadway melodrama.

Either you have enough merit in your "karma" and then you get into "nirvana" and your energy will merge into the cosmic energy of the universe, in otherwise BINGO! Or you will be reborn in one of six possible realms. The realm of the gods who will survive in bliss one full life to be reborn again when death comes again. The realm of the asura, divine again but jealous of the real gods but that will only be for one life. Then in the human realm and that's the only realm where you can hope to improve your karma and envisage the possibility of getting into nirvana. Then the realm of animals and no chance there to improve your karma. Then the realm of hungry ghosts, monsters who are thirsty and hungry for blood and fresh human flesh, cannibalism and vampirism, and the two together werewolves and wolfmen. Finally Hell itself where you will be tortured for a life time in your mental body but be sure that will be just as painful as if it were your physical body, except that your mental body never dies and recuperates at once. You just have the pain, over and over again.

Since our western world has been weaned of any real religious belief and practice, since our religious rites are nothing but habitual actions that are part of the backdrop of our life, we are totally unarmed in front of that death and we are afraid, and we are panicky, and we are traumatized. What's more there are two eras in this world of ours.

Before, when people lived less than fifty years, death was an everyday event and most of the time a child saw his or her grandparents die when he or she was less than five and the grandparents he or she knew then were those of other younger children. So we cried a little, we celebrated a little bit more than just a little and adults got drunk to forget, and then the show had to go on. Religions were there to make us believe that these dead people had only departed to go on the big journey to the other world, because there was another world.

But after, when people live more than eighty years, it is not rare to have three or four generations in a family; for the parents to retire when their children are still in the process of training for a job one day. Then death has become a lot more unnatural and there is no solace in traditional religions. That's where Tibetan Buddhism comes into the picture and reinvents the Judeo-Christian myth of life seen as a valley of tears, the world as a sea of lachrymal fluids, and our lot as nothing but a sequence of dramatic tragedies. Then life is turned into some kind of permanent mourning not for death but for the death or deaths to come and every single event is seen in its end, in its termination, in the fact it will not last long. And we will suffer hell and blazes when they come to their end.

That is efficacious to prevent depression and to get used or accustomed to the fact that any moment of bliss is a blitzkrieg against doom and suffering and death. It all started when a certain Rhys-Davids, the founder of the Pali Society at Oxford University, Great Britain, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, at the time of the British Empire, published his first Pali-English dictionary giving the false but perfectly Christian translation of '"suffering" for the central Buddhist concept of "dukkha." That Oxford scholar, probably a Don too, was wrong and his translation that Buddhism has been dragging behind itself ever since and all the time was just a misinterpretation of the word in canonical Buddhism, maybe because Rhys-Davids was there and then under the strong influence of the only Tibetan tradition. The Chinese Zen tradition would laugh at that naiveté.

So Nathan, who has become a messenger of death because at the age of eight he died and was resuscitated by some doctor, knowing that his wife is going to die soon, drops his whole life in New York and comes back to his wife from whom he was at least separated, just to accompany her into death. That's just the most absurd story I have heard. Any decent human being, knowing he or she was going to die would certainly not require anyone close to him or her to drop out of society to become the slave servant of him or her, a plain dying relative. In other words we do not see the coming death from the one person who should be concerned, Claire herself, but only from the point of view of Nathan, the messenger who does not deliver the message, the coward who does not know anything but submission and acceptance. That is supposed to be equanimity but in fact it is plain absurdity. It is true if he did hand out the message to Claire, she would consider he is out of his mind, and maybe even harassing her. A court order would be at once called for to keep that dangerous maniac at certain distance of her, Claire, and their daughter.

And yet some scenes are very powerful, lost in an ocean of wordy sentimentalism.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Here's yet another film that attempts to seriously suggest the existence of such things as life after death, clairvoyance, and whatnot, and have us get all misty-eyed about it.

Instead of treating these Final Destination subjects as the comedy or horror or comedy-horror themes they rightly are, we're given a dull sort of mystery that's supposed to also be a love story. Who is going to die next? (Not a big surprise if you've seen more than two films in your life.)

The fact is, we're ALL going to die. Nobody gets to live forever. And only those who take their own lives get to decide when they die. The rest of us gamble a minute at a time that we won't suffer a fatal brain aneurysm or get killed by lightning.

The thing about death is that it's final. Sure, there's medical death, which can be survived, and is sometimes intentionally used for surgical purposes. But then there's the death we all know about, the death that is either embalmed, plastinated, burned, or allowed to rot, beyond which nothing ever returns. Ever. It will happen to all of us.

If people actually knew when or how death was coming, this would be a markedly different world. There's a lot of money to be made in things like setting up your will the way you want it before you die, instead of what it was 10 years ago when you last revised it. Or trimming back your insurance policy so it doesn't go all the way to age 90. Or stepping down from an organization so it won't be left suddenly leaderless. Probably the best use is so that would-be assassins and other murderers are caught and prosecuted immediately after their (apparently unstoppable) crimes.

Of course, this film's biggest mistake is in the idea that we really only need to care about people when they're about to die. Most of us know that's not true, and we don't need the supernatural to justify it.

I've noticed some negativity about Romain's performance, but I thought it was reasonable for the role.

For a movie that concerned itself so much with death and dying, I was surprised at how much it said about life and learning how to live. Anyone who has been through a period of personal evolution will be able to relate to the main character as he reflects on the past events of his life and begins to change the dynamic of how he lives going forward. Those who haven't already reached these conclusions on their own will probably find it more difficult to understand.

I believe the reserved performance by the main character was a perfect representation of a man who is led by his career and by practical matters, and has shut himself off from his emotions and any real sense of living. Malkovich plays the somewhat creepy, mysterious benefactor of insights unseen (until the end of the movie) and delivers everything you'd expect from him in such a role. The female characters generate the same sympathy and compassion from the audience as they do from their male counterparts in the film, and that's why this movie works. If we are moved, we understand how they would be moved.

Preparing oneself to die by truly embracing life is not the theme I was expecting from this movie, but it's probably a better one than what I was looking for. I generally classify movies like this as "must see" films because anyone that hasn't figured something like this out on their own, really should. And the sooner, the better.

This movie was slightly entertaining in ways, but not in the most obvious kind of way one might expect. The actors were entertaining to watch during some scenes and the plot and story were okay. But why does the poster include John Malcovich with a gun? I had to double take at the middle of the film to check if I saw the poster correctly or not, and lo and behold, he's holding a gun. I guess it's symbolic, but if you are any sort of like me, sometimes looking at a poster and seeing the actor are how I judge what a film is going to be about, adding into my calculation about how much and why I might enjoy watching it. I guess I learned the hard way.

This is my first review on IMDb and while I am a serious movie fan, I definitely do not consider myself a movie critic...I mostly judge movies on how I like them and why... So consider the following an account of my liking rather than something you would expect in the feuilleton...

I have read many reviews on IMDb and was rather amazed that there are (so far) only two reviews available on this motion picture. In my opinion "Afterwards" is an excellent movie, which is why I decided to add a third review here...

--------- *SPOILER ALERT*----------

"Afterwards" is the story of successful New York lawyer Nathan (played by Romain Duris) who through the acquaintance of Dr. Kay (John Malkovich) learns of and about his role as a messenger (of death). A messenger can see when other people are about to die unexpectedly through sickness or unnatural causes. He or she then ought to enter these peoples' lives in a way such that they may die in peace with themselves and their loved ones. The price for being a messenger is such that the messenger him- or herself has lost or will lose the person closest to him or her - in the case of Nathan it is his (ex-)wife with whom he reconnects throughout the movie.

--------- *SPOILER ALERT END*----------

The movie is slowly paced and in spite of what has been written in one of the other reviews not confusing at all. The plot is rather straightforward and only occasional flashbacks into Nathan's life take the viewer on a little detour story-wise.

In my opinion "Afterwards" features the best acting of John Malkovich since "Being John Malkovich" and again au contraire to what has been said in one of the earlier reviews a more than solid performance by Romain Duris. Personally I loved his subdued portrayal of Nathan. Evangeline Lilly in the supporting role of his wife is very relatable, but not the center of attention in this picture.

All in all I do think this movie is not what you would normally call highly entertaining or thought-provoking. However, while one can always argue about the story (basically it says "carpe diem"), it is very moving and may take the viewer (certainly me at least) on a journey of emotions that takes you out of your daily life and lets you question your own priorities and ways doing things - of living fully, if not happily.

As a closing remark I also want to congratulate Alexandre Desplat on a very fine soundtrack. It certainly does not compare the likes of Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, etc in terms of force and presence. But for those who appreciate a fine and delicate soundtrack I think it will work even as stand-alone (I bought it). In any case it finely supports the characters and the emotions they experience in this tale about life and death - and love.

From the reviews I gathered that the 2008 Afterwards is an adaptation of the novel in French, Et Apres. This explains the theme of us not knowing the hour of our own deaths, and even more importantly, not knowing before then, which of the people we know well and who are well, will die and how. But the interest of the story doesn't explain why the director handled the theme the way he did. What are the images of the Quebec countryside, summer and winter, in direct contrast with? After all, Claire is a photographer of nature who is insisting on photographing in the snow at night a plant that only blooms one day a year. She thinks husband Nathan is a creep for being a natural at his job as a New York City lawyer. Cinematographer Pin Bing Lee and film editor Valerie Deseine have filled a large number of earlier frames with office building windows. All this is woven together by the music of Alexandre Desplat. Surely an intention was for all of us to see a bright white light surrounding each of us, in preparation for not knowing when the next NYC 9-11 will be and how.