Yahoo Lifestyle ‘After This Death’ Review: Mia Maestro Can’t Get Lee Pace Out of Her System in Lucio Castro’s Elegant Oddity
Sometimes there’s a song within you that just needs to come out, as many a musician has said in a puff-piece interview. But what if you’re not sure it’s your voice fighting its way up your throat? Argentine writer-director Lucio Castro dangles this question in “After This Death,” a quivery, elusive and strangely moving psychological drama that flirts with outright horror-tinged silliness — only to be pulled back from the brink by the quiet emotional gravity applied to a cryptic scenario. If not quite as fully, radiantly formed as Castro’s 2019 debut, the time-slipping queer heartbreaker “End of the Century,” this unusual, sleekly atmospheric item nonetheless sees the filmmaker clearing the difficult-second-album hurdle — with, aptly enough, a story that hinges on a singularly complicated album recording process.
Much credit for “After This Death” succeeding as well as it does is owed to Castro’s compatriot and leading lady Mia Maestro, an intelligent, grounding presence who lends proceedings the right balance of skepticism and credulity as they loop into quasi-Hitchcockian territory. Her fragile integrity plays interestingly against the star casting of Lee Pace as the affected art-rock god leading Maestro’s character into an cosmic puzzle. His cocksure sendup of a particular mystic-himbo archetype contributes a strain of sly comedy to a film otherwise marked by a sincere intensity of feeling. Drawn by the actors, distributors may well play up the thriller trappings of this Berlinale Special premiere, though it resists tidy classification.
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Maestro plays Isabel, an Argentine voiceover artist now settled with her American husband Ted (Rupert Friend) in a chic modernist cabin in rural upstate New York — though she still feels somewhat displaced and adrift, as described in her inner monologue, a Spanish-language counterpart to the film’s otherwise English-language dialogue. Pregnant with her first child, and with Ted often away on business, she soothes her anxious soul with frequent solitary walks through the local landscape — captured here by DP Barton Cortright (“The Cathedral”) in a permanently autumnal state of deep coppers and bronzes, with the occasional, enduring flash of hunter green.
It’s in a secluded cave mouth that she meets fellow hiker Elliott (Pace), who charms her with his flirty, faux-philosophical observations of the nature around them, though she ignores his attempt to give her his number. Weeks afterward, while accompanying her friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie, somewhat distractingly cast in a stock part) to a gig, she realizes that Elliott is in fact the frontman of a rock band with an ardent cult following — their sound somewhere between an especially woodsy iteration of The National and Jim Morrison at his most loquaciously stoned. It is a key point of conflict that Isabel alone is underwhelmed, even amused, by Elliott’s verbose, spoke-sung ramblings on stage to a rapt, reverent audience. But she’s down bad for him just the same, not least when, with a straight face, he offers a memorably blunt statement-as-invitation: “I’m a great pussy eater.”
She takes him at his word, and a headlong affair ensues — only to be stopped short when she experiences a stillbirth. Amid her trauma, it’s a second, less clear-cut tragedy that plunges the film into the realm of the uncanny, as souls are entwined or perhaps merged in the incident, and Elliott’s disappearance from the scene doesn’t feel exactly final. His obsessive fans, meanwhile, appear to transfer their fixation to her, in increasingly menacing ways, as they impatiently await the band’s long-promised final album. Castro’s script cleverly plays upon the hyper-online scrutiny and intricate code-breaking of contemporary music fandom to paranoia-feeding ends, though the film perhaps overly tips its hand as to its tonal intentions with an early “Vertigo” namecheck.
It helps that the band’s music, composed by Robert Lambardo, feels like it could exist in the real world, and accrue that kind of devoted, close-reading audience: densely knotted lyrical imagery set to a mixture of spare acoustic instrumentation and muzzily distorted industrial noise. Yegang Yoo’s score, with its whispery synths and woodwind notes, serves as an airier sonic counterpoint throughout — seemingly more the music of Isabel’s mind than Elliott’s.
Eventually the two sounds will meet in the middle, with affecting and even cathartic results. Beneath the layers of existential mystery that give “After This Death” its eerie pull is an earnest, granular ode to art and how it’s constructed, whether for purely personal release or communication with another party, known or unknown, of this earth or somewhere beyond.
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