If you don’t read any more of this review, read the next line.
Hereafter is a terrible movie.
It is two hours and nine minutes of nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Nothing happens, nothing is resolved, nothing is exciting.
If only the film had concentrated on the characters rather than a concept. Then maybe I wouldn’t have had to force myself to stay in the theater the entire time. It had the potential to be watchable.
As it is, the movie is not watchable.
The film follows three story-lines.
A retired psychic can see into the afterlife by skin-on-skin contact. His “curse” makes a romantic life impossible, but he attempts to have a normal life.
A French journalist experiences death during a catastrophic vacation, then spends the rest of the movie trying to explain it.
A British schoolboy has the worst story. His mother is an addict, and he and his twin brother do all they can to keep their family together and stay out of foster care. Then his twin is hit by a van and killed. The boy contacts a variety of fake psychics to try to contact his deceased brother.
The movie didn’t sound so bad to me by that description. It isn’t an action movie, so no slow-motion shootouts were expected. It just sounded like drama or suspense.
It isn’t.
Matt Damon plays the psychic and is the only draw to see the movie. Unfortunately, he is in less than half of it.
The film focuses on the French journalist the most often. When it does, the movie is in French with English subtitles. Nothing loses my attention faster than an unexciting film in a different language.
If Hereafter had focused on the people – or better yet, just one person – instead of the concept of death, the movie might have been marginally better.
As it is, the main point of the movie is that death is unexplained. Nobody truly knows what happens after death in the hereafter. In fact, nobody truly wants to know.
There. That is all that happened in the movie. Nothing.
Don’t go see it.