28-02-2025
After this Death: This weird romantic mystery is curiously spellbinding
After This Death is an odd, alluring tale of strangers finding each other, obscurely changing each other, then pulling apart. It's an unresolved romantic mystery that's hard to categorise, and for a probable majority of viewers it will be too oblique by half. That said, it's itchy and interesting: I want to see it again.
All the same points could be made more fulsomely about Lucio Castro's previous film, the exquisite, Barcelona-set gay love story End of the Century (2019). Set in upstate New York, After This Death has a vibe as autumnal as the earlier film was summery; it's in English rather than Spanish; and involves a fling between members of the opposite sex. What unites the films is Castro's open-ended, keenly curious sensibility, which can make ephemeral connections feel like the key to all life.
Isabel (Mía Maestro), a voice artist from Argentina, is serenely alone in a cave, where she has paused during a solo woodland hike, when Elliott (Lee Pace) stumbles upon her. She's visibly pregnant, and by strange coincidence the due date is the same as his birthday. The baby's father, Isabel's husband Ted (Rupert Friend), is a distant character away on business, who we don't meet for some while: their relationship seems open, but it's unusual for Isabel to show such overt interest in another man.
Elliott is quite a catch, to be fair: a shaggy-haired underground rock star with a small but terrifyingly intense cult following. Pace, exploiting his height nicely as an unabashed frontman, has charisma to burn in the role, but etches him with swaggering narcissism, too. That isn't a deal-breaker for Isabel, who accompanies her in-the-know friend Alice (a fetching Gwendoline Christie) to a gig by Elliott's band, who go by the obviously pretentious name Likeliness Increases.
Even though Isabel doesn't rate their dirge-like music whatsoever, she's perfectly happy for Elliott to give her oral sex in the car park afterwards. The pair's ensuing affair is broken off when Elliott disappears, causing Isabel to be stalked by his most obsessive fans, as the film tips ever so briefly into thriller territory.
The moody solemnity of all this is faintly absurd, but rather beguiling, precisely because it feels so out of time, so non-cutting-edge. We could easily mistake Castro's story for being set in the early days of internet message-boards, until we spot a stray laptop or phone to disabuse us. If the plot made any bids for strict plausibility, it would collapse, because it relishes too many spooky coincidences that are just that. While the lovers talk about Hitchcock in one scene, the film is a long way from actually behaving like one of his.
It's about a funny range of things: looking for hidden messages in song lyrics, when they very possibly aren't there; feeding internet fandom with self-consciously mysterious gestures; dissatisfaction and a desire to make art, even if it's weird, and it's unclear if even the artist understands it. Maestro, who puts her lovely singing voice to use, presents us with a character who's impulsive, confused, and looking for something, beyond Elliott, that she probably couldn't name. There's no denying that the final drift is wispy and incomplete, but I was quite spellbound.
