Up There

Beautifully acted, nice story that looks sympathetically at people and asks a few questions that it lets you answer, if you wish. It is also beautifully shot with nicely framed views of the sea and ordinary lives. Draws you in to its pace and little world. Much as I like "Knight and Day" (and I do), watch this rather than a second viewing of that.

Up There is a low budget quirky film dealing with the afterlife like it is being stuck in an Immigration Centre in Croydon as an employee.

Martin (Burn Gorman) killed in a road traffic accident is stuck in the afterlife waiting room. He is waiting, hoping he is ready to go up there but until then he welcomes the newly departed by helping them get registered and fill in the bureaucratic forms.

His afterlife is thrown into disarray when he has to team up with the chippy and motor mouthed cod street gangster Rash and together they lose a new arrival and end up in a small seaside town trying to find the runaway soul. Maybe Martin will finally care about the deceased people around him rather than hang around and wait for time to pass by.

Up There is a low key film with a washed out look. It definitely makes you feel that being dead is no fun, actually being dead is crap and boring where the guys try to find a nice place where they can see couples having sex.

Its a bittersweet, dry comedy and Burn Gorman plays it gloomily deadpan as he sees his best friend moving on to his grieving widow and his best friend in the afterlife move upstairs without him. Of course Gorman has form here, he played a dead Torchwood agent still walking after he got killed!

Like another reviewer above, I didn't know what to expect of this film. For the first ten minutes or so I was doubtful that it would keep my interest for 80 minutes, as it seemed it could just be a 'one-joke' film. How wrong I was! By the end of the film, as with a good book, I was sorry to say goodbye to the characters - particularly the lead, Martin, played with incredible subtlety and sensitivity of facial expression by Burn Gorman - and had grown to care about them, just as 'Martin' learns genuinely to care about his fellow-ghosts stuck in limbo. Funny, with little digs at 21st century bureaucracy (form filling/tick boxes/targets/I-hear-you counselling)mirroring the world of the so-called 'living' with horrible precision. I liked the almost-not-quite monochrome of the filming, and a lot of the camera work, but the performances were the outstanding thing and the script itself. There have been many films about people who are officially dead speaking and moving amongst the living, from quite serious efforts like 'Ghost' to the zombie film Shaun of the Dead. This is a new take, and one of the best, in my opinion. Funny, though, two German friends of mine saw it tonight also, and didn't get it at all! 'Perhaps it is the British sense of humour?' they enquired, sadly. Yet a German reviewer above gives it 8 out of 10. There's no telling! I recommend it for a gentle, thoughtful and at the end of the day quite moving hour and twenty minutes of cinematic entertainment. Go see!

This is a very nice film, in which the main character is trying to figure out the meaning of after-life. And after-life can be a very depressing place, including group-therapy, and the nagging suspicion that your superiors are judging you every step of the way. A typically grey and gloomy Scottish atmosphere provides the background against which the main character tries to muddle through with a DIY-mentality ("Don't Involve Yourself") - which is disturbed by his "side-kick", a walking Ali G parody, whose "help" is the last thing anyone needs.

Although in style this film is based on a subdued form of humour, you find yourself chuckling through most of the film and laughing out loud very frequently. The last one is mainly courtesy of the "side-kick". This is not a film for those who prefer their films jam-packed with action. In fact, "inaction" and "being/feeling trapped" is an important topic of the film. So the "speed" of the film is conformable to its rather grey atmosphere - so, tempo and atmosphere are a bit like the Frances McDormand scenes in Fargo.

The cast is excellent throughout, and Burn Gorman has the chance to shine in the lead role. This film gives the audience a chance to see the high quality he has as an actor, which is a nice change for those of us who only know him from the vastly inferior TV-series "Torchwood", whose crappy scripts and stories manage to sabotage even talents as big as those of Gorman and Barrowman.

Well, I don't feel I can give it ten stars, but I do highly recommend this inventive, gentle and touching black comedy.

You'd think being dead would be easy, but it turns out it is a bit of a minefield. "Carers" escort you to a Restart Centre that seems like a cross between a bureaucratic Jobcentre and a group therapy session. If you don't have the right attitude, you will never be allowed to pass on to the afterlife proper (to go "up there").

Burn Gorman (Martin), Aymen Hamdouchi (Rash) and Kate O'Flynn (Liz) give outstanding performances. The characters they portray are wonderfully written by Zam Salim, who also directs.

There's clearly a lot of "suffering" here (for example, Slab Boy Joey), but it's the generous humanity of many of the deceased that shines through.