Life after death

Hereafter (2010)

Clint Eastwood has been a busy man these past few years, delivering a film a year in average. And most notably all of them are quite good and some even quite great. This one is certainly not in the great department. I mean it's a very solid drama, what else would you expect from him and it's surely not bad, but it feels a bit powerless. The style is very muted and the characters feel numb. At some points that works great, but to be honest it did get a bit tedious at times. The movie tells three separate stories, one about a French journalist who nearly dies in a tsunami, second is about an American blue-collar worker who can connect with the dead and the third one is about a young English boy who loses his brother. We follow how they deal with death each in their own ways. The journalist story is the weakest of the bunch, it has the best events with the tsunami and quite a bit of depth to the story, but yet it feels a bit superficial. The "psychic" is quite a good story with tons of interesting dilemmas. The Brittish school boy story is however the best of the lot, it brings out laughs and tears being by far the most touching and entertaining of them all. How they all bind together in the end is a bit cheesy, but wasn't that bad. So it's a good fantasy drama for open minded people, but you don't have to believe in life after death to enjoy it, at least I enjoyed it.
75%