After Life - Hirokazu Kore-Eda (1998)

I watched Kore-eda’s After Life in class this semester, my only prior knowledge being the topic of the film, made apparent by the title. Although in Japan the title is ワンダフルライフ, Katakana for “Wonderful Life,” it’s obvious why Kore-eda wanted to change it for its international release.

After Life is very much an art film—it takes place in a sort of old facility where the deceased, with the help of the staff members that work there, recall their favorite memories so they can be reconstructed as films and relived for eternity. Not only does the film delve deep in the human attachment to memory, but it also questions the recreations we form in our mind, and even the ability of the film medium to represent dreams and reality. Yet After Life is never over-dramatic or pretentious, a great risk for dealing with such intense themes.

Kore-eda is incredibly subtle, and he puts his background in documentaries to great use. The cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki, a veteran documentary photographer, lends a realistic aesthetic that really compliments the themes and mood of the film. Supposedly many of the people interviewed in the film were actually non-actors interviewed by Kore-eda during pre-production. The dialogue, then, feels improvised, and the stories that the deceased tell are real and touching. At times the film even feels more documentary than fiction, until you remember that the interviewees are ghosts in a world after life.



This film really grew on me after my first viewing, and I’ve since re-watched parts of it. The emotional journey is very fulfilling—ranging from melancholy, to frustration, to humor, to nostalgic bliss. And surprisingly, the film does a very good job of answering all the technical questions about after life that could possibly detract from the realism of the film, like “Who are the people working there?” or “What happens when people can’t choose a memory?”

I highly, highly recommend this film. It’s deceptively moving, and it’s definitely one of those experiences that linger around, forcing you to ask yourself things you didn’t really want to deal with before. I’ll conclude by saying that if I had to believe in an after life, this is the one I’d hope for the most.