OxfordPress.com

Verdict: A quietly powerful look at life, seen from the viewpoint of the dead.

Details: Starring Taketoshi Naito, Arata and Erika Oda. Unrated. 1 hour, 58 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Sometimes, culture can define the intangible. That's the case of the upcoming "Last Night," which views the end of the world through dry, Canadian common sense. Then there's "After Life," a lovely meditation on what it means to be alive. It presents the passage from mortality into the eternal in what you could call traditional Japanese terms: It's a matter of hard work, diligence and quiet dignity.

In writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda's charming cosmology, the recently dead arrive on a Monday at a remote, somewhat shabby complex that resembles an old high school. There, they are assigned agents such as the young man Mochizuki (Arata), or the only woman on the job, Shiori (Erika Oda).

Yes, they're dead, too. But at this way station, it's their job to help the newly deceased make the jump to heaven. Specifically, they give the newcomers three days to select a single memory from their lives. Then, the agents will set about re-creating that moment on a sound stage — whether it's the memory of cascading cherry blossoms, or a flight through the clouds in a Cessna — and filming it. The dead will pass on into the next world with all memories of their time on earth gone, except for this select one.

There's something wonderfully goofy about this, but the process is presented with a lovely earnestness. The best parts of the movie are the interviews with the recently dead. Kore-eda's background as a documentarian comes in nicely; the film includes nonactors recalling moments of their lives on-camera. A listless day in an autumnal park. A secret tryst in a hotel room. A bus ride on the next-to-last day of school. Their mingled voices become hypnotic, and even the most mundane detail becomes extraordinary and poignant under the circumstances.

The slight plot focuses on one old man named Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito), whose life has been so uneventful that he can't come up with a memory. So Mochizuki and Shiori bring him a vast pile of videotapes, documenting his entire life from an impersonal distance. His ultimate choice of a last memory resonates with the secret history of one of the helpful facilitators, pushing the movie toward a poignant epiphany — that the best memory of your entire life might be encased in someone else's memory of you.

As it follows the quiet dead in their familiar rituals — playing games, drinking tea, wandering through the woods — "After Life" offers a comforting view of the Great Unknown as a pleasantly familiar place. It's a very simple movie with a surprisingly complex emotional undertow.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service