Aubrey MaloneWe are being taken for a gigantic ride by the writer/director Jeff Baena.
Life After Beth
(15A)
With lines like, “My whole family has been massacred, you should be more supportive” and “How could I be dead? Mom and dad would have told me,” you can be assured this is no ordinary film.
It begins ordinarily enough with the funeral of Beth (Aubrey Plaza), the girlfriend of Zach (Dane DeHaan). She has apparently died after being bitten by a snake. But then one night, Zach spots her at home looking very alive indeed. Suddenly everything changes.
Was she really dead? Has she been reincarnated? All sorts of thoughts go through your mind, including the possibility that the whole film could all be a dream on Zach’s part. But then things get crazier and crazier. Other ‘dead’ people start appearing with alarming regularity. We realise we’re being taken for a gigantic ride by the writer/director Jeff Baena.
This might have been okay if it was conducted in a spirit of satirical fun but, after a while, the film takes a sick twist. We’re confronted with more and more live/dead people in all their baroque excesses.
I’ve written before about what I take to be the inappropriate classification of films. This one comes with a 15A cert which means a 15-year-old can see it if accompanied by an adult. If I had 15-year-old children I wouldn’t want them to be exposed to this kind of gratuitous grotesquery, either accompanied or unaccompanied.
Some 15-year-olds may disagree with me. They may laugh at the hysterical antics on display as corpses appear in sedate suburban homes, but I found it decidedly unfunny, despite the best efforts of a quality cast (including John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon and Cheryl Hines) to ‘play it straight’ – the first law of good comedy.
Cult appeal
In time the film may acquire the cult appeal of, say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but for me it was little more than a one-joke movie that wore thin long before the final credits rolled.
The idea of zombie movies becoming excuses for unlimited displays of nervous laughter has been done to death – pardon the pun – by the likes of Wes Craven in the past.
This latest addition to the mini-genre, which starts impressively before imploding under a barrage of tasteless and derivative set-pieces, fails to add anything to that unfortunate phenomenon.