I am on the fence about Hereafter, a supernatural drama that explores the afterlife starring Matt Damon and directed by Clint Eastwood.
The film itself is extremely well made, which one comes to expect from Eastwood. And the cast does excellent work. The film tells the story of three people and their experience with death. George, an American psychic, living in San Francisco who can connect with people who have passed on. Marie (Cecile de France), a French journalist who has a vision of the afterlife when she is almost drowned in a tsunami and twin brothers Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren) connected by an auto accident.
As these three separate groups of people search for answers about life after death their lives will eventually be combined as they search for meaning in their individual experiences.
This is Eastwood's first foray into supernatural territory and I don't know if I had expectations for a Sixth Sense style movie or something more of a suspense thriller. The film is a straight forward drama that deals with the subject of life after death in an intelligent manner, yet I felt the film was slow and had no compelling story to carry me along. The most dramatic moments in the film, the tsunami, occur in the first 10 minutes and the film seems to be a let down after that. There are notions of a romance and the films resolutions are uplifting but I felt it took way too long to get there.
I am going to recommend the film because it challenged my expectations of what this type of movie should be like. it handled its subject matter with grace and dignity and left me with something to contemplate. I am not sure how a film that felt so lacking in substance could do this but it did. I suggest you see it for yourself because, in the end Clint Eastwood always delivers work of excellent technical quality and for that alone it is worth seeing.
At The Movie House rating **1/2 stars
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