
It is safe to say that Connie Britton’s acting chops will not be the ones that will suffer the most even with the one-dimensional character she plays in “Here After(2024),” but after all it is still a dull story.
The first feature film by longtime producer Robert Salerno (he of 21 Grams, A Single Man, I’m Thinking of Ending Things) goes over familiar horror turf again, creepy kids suppressed family issues, and heavy Catholic overtones. In his position as a director, he prefers the use of skewed angles and gentle downpouring to convey a sense of quiet eeriness. However, his style quickly becomes repetitive and hackneyed. After all, there is a limit to how many slasher films one can produce. This is even more ironic, given how he directed so many innovative indies, including Vox Lux and Nocturnal Animals, that one wonders why he now decides to tell such an ordinary tale.
“Here After” is the creation of a screenplay from Sarah Conradt and it focuses on the American Claire Hiller who is a divorcée living in Rome, teaching at a girl’s school. Her child, Robin (Freya Hannan-Mills), is a teenager and a pianist who aspires to study at a top college dealing with only this kind of music and has incredibly modest speech. Most of the time, she is selectively mute and uses sign language and her music to express herself, but remains upbeat. There’s really not much to her.
On the way to an important audition in the afternoon, Robin has a bad bicycle accident (in the rain of course). Doctors claim she was medically dead for 20 minutes. But miraculously, she is somehow able to return from the dead, a bit… changed. To begin with, she is able to talk, something she has not done for the last 10 years. But she also with mysterious excitement has an unusual amount of attitude; all she wants is to sit and watch cartoons or listen to rock music all day and a devilish smile creeps across her face as her eyes grow darker.
Are the fluctuations in Robin’s behavior the result of teenage hormones? Is there something more sinister at play? Or is it Claire who is on the brink? The former’s life and Claire’s fantasies carry quite an interest at first, but in the course of “Here After,” such techniques are repeated that it gets boring. At least Claire has someone to talk to, another colleague, Viv (Babetida Sadjo, a pleasant character), although her pathetic ex-husband (Giovanni Cirfiera) serves no purpose. Towards the end, she visits a priest, crying out that, “Only God can do something.” The shift to religiousness doesn’t provide enough of a shock to the portrayal of the emotions or the progression of the character – why would it, after all, she has been around from the onset fashioning a huge cross and asking us whether she would not pray when in trouble. But Britton’s attributes allow him to always be good, making it believable that Claire is in pain, that she is even in the sort of pain that comes from the Other.
The delicacy that Britton possesses is particularly poignant in the climax of the film; this is a more dreamlike sequence that significantly departs from the formalistic approaches that came before it. The tenses during this segment could be considered a bit too slow, in consideration of the fact that the segment in particular was supposed to be quite evocative. Wouldnt But Salerno
makes in such stylistic risk here, through the eye of the camera of Bartosz Nalazek, that one wonders why he did not make such bold stylistic decisions at all.
Rather, this low tempo narrative of regret and other things that have to do with forgiveness is quite flat, and mostly ceremoniously distant, like the several bland shots of Rome that it tries to present the audience with.
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