Life After Beth

Aubrey Plaza just nailed the role. Never realized she is so tallented

The synopsis of this movie is what caught my interest, and the DVD cover also brandished 'the best zom-rom-com since Shaun of the Dead'. So I will say that the playing field for this movie was right there for a home-run.

But the movie turned out to be just another mediocre zombie movie, and I will say that "Warm Bodies" was much, much better than "Life After Beth". So there is a comparison for you right there.

While "Life After Beth" started out alright, then director Jeff Baena set up the scenario for more than he could handle, and t he movie just fell to a heap of disappointing pieces.

There wasn't a single moment throughout the movie that made me laugh, so for a comedy, then the movie failed to deliver. The movie was adequate entertainment, don't get me wrong, but it hardly sustains more than a single viewing.

The cast list was good though, and people were doing good jobs with their given roles and characters.

"Life After Beth" was a mediocre movie that set out to accomplish more than it could handle, and as such it scores a very mediocre five out of ten stars from me.

Version: Grimm Up North festival screening

Actors: 7/10

Plot/script: 7/10

Photography/visual style: 7/10

Music/score: 7/10

Overall: 7/10

It's astonishing how broad the range can be even within a sub-genre of films. Life After Beth is best described as a 'horror comedy', and yet it is completely different to other horror comedies I saw on the very same day.

The comedy comes from the situation, not the characters, who are played pretty straight. Beth (Aubrey Plaza) comes back from the dead, forcing her boyfriend Zach (Dane DeHaan) and parents (John C Reilly and Molly Shannon) to confront their grief and the conflicted feelings they have about her and their lives with her. Over the film, her behaviour becomes more abnormal, and other undead appear, causing increasing chaos.

The pacing and balance of the film are remarkably well managed. Plaza does a great job with her performance, slowly showing increasing signs of deterioration from ordinary teenage girl to mindless zombie, and each other character's reaction to the bizarre situation is shown to be ridiculous at one point or another. I note that director Jeff Baena's main other contribution to film is co-writing the script for David O. Russell's surreal comedy 'I Heart Huckabees', and I think he should really be seen as a writer who has taken up directing.

Lots of ideas are explored through Life After Beth, such as grief and the way our memories change as time passes. There is a little bit of action and tension, but mainly this is a melancholic, thoughtful piece which brings humour out of the behaviour of normal people in an abnormal situation. It's a writer's film, and an actor's film, and I found it rather touching as well as entertaining.

The exhausted zombie subgenre gets a much needed fresh take with this tiny budgeted horror comedy. A zombie epidemic is strictly background material and it begins with Zach played by Dane DeHaan, who does a good job here, grieving over the death of his girlfriend Beth. He bonds with her parents, played by John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon, who make the most of their underwritten parts. It's not before long that Beth returns and she and Zach continue their relationship - which is obviously headed for disaster. Aubrey Plaza does good work with her usual deadpan line readings and there's some hilarious scenes with her spastic rage and violence. Life After Beth is a small, lightweight film, the side characters can occasionally fall into sitcom-ish territory, but it does have some genuine big laughs.

Starts out decent enough, initially I thought that it was a good thing that the movie started straight away with Beth being dead so you wouldn't just sit and wait for her to die so she could finally come back from the dead.

But really in retrospect, had there been any scenes of her life and her relationsship with Zach perhaps that would make the viewer understand exactly what it was that Zach fell for in Beth in the first place.

Cause the "living dead" Beth has zero personality, and she doesn't seem to care much about Zach after her death (nor anything else for that matter) so it's hard to see why Zach would still be so deeply in love with her based on her personality after death, it surely must have differed a bit.

But then again, most characters in this movie are one-tracked one- dimensional beings so maybe not, maybe she always was like that, which would just add more confusion as to why Zach (who is a fairly normal kid) would like her that much.

But then again not much about this movie makes much sense.

I guess it tries to be sort of a dark comedy but it's not dark enough, dark comedy is supposed to shock the viewer or be slightly disturbing at least, this movie just fails at that completely, and the horror aspect of the movie: forget about it.

I don't know why John C Reilly who I like tons would appear in this movie, based on his performance I don't think he did either, hope he got a good paycheck for it at least.

Molly Shannon plays the mother, at least on paper, there was nothing motherly about her character, and she wasn't funny either, just a very flat character.

I dunno what to say more about this movie, it fails at being funny and scary and it also fails at being good and it even fails at being completely terrible, it's just a big soup of mehhh.