‘After This Death’ review: Niche US-set mystery is an 'arch, implausible affair'

Dir/scr: Lucio Castro. US 2025. 96 minutes

In a movie riddled with outrageous coincidences, it is probably not a good suggestion to have characters touch upon how outrageous these coincidences are – or idly drop mentions of their favorite Hitchcock movies. In After This Dying, this could also be designed to warn the viewer to not take its narrative an excessive amount of at face worth, and to inform us that the mission is basically arthouse slightly than style mainstream. Even so, this shiny however inert US-set thriller from Argentinian writer-director Lucio Castro doesn’t intrigue almost as a lot as meant, regardless of a coolly intense efficiency from lead Mia Maestro and dashes of on-off chemistry between her and co-star Lee Tempo.

 Shiny however inert

Whereas there’s not a substantial amount of intercourse right here, apart from a discreet lick of toe-sucking, the movie – Castro’s follow-up to his 2019 debut Finish Of The Century – has the odd really feel of a considerably unstitched 80s/90s erotic thriller gussied up with enigmatic solemnity. It bows as a Berinale Particular Gala, and is prone to enchantment totally on a really area of interest stage to followers of artwork/style hybrids.

Maestro (who intermittently narrates in Spanish voice-over) performs Isabel, an Argentinian girl dwelling within the US the place she works as a voice artist. Strolling within the woods the place she lives in a brutalist chateau-like mansion with husband Ted (Rupert Buddy), she visits a cave and has a borderline-flirtatious encounter with a passerby named Elliott (Tempo). Later, at a music gig with a author buddy (Gwendoline Christie), she meets Elliott once more: he’s the singer in Likeliness Will increase, an digital rock trio whose followers have an obsessive regard for his music, and for him. That night time, Isabel – regardless of being each married and pregnant – begins an affair with Elliott. 

Earlier than too lengthy, nonetheless, Elliott immediately vanishes – as does all hint of the avidly awaited eleventh album that he’s supposedly recording together with his reticent brother Ronnie (Philip Ettinger). As Isabel’s life takes a darkish flip, troubling issues begin to occur round her; even, in an totally crazy scene whose ironic comedy doesn’t fairly discover its register, the arrival of a voice message personally delivered by a dancing Pierrot-style performer. By the point the movie turns right into a type of deconstructed woman-in-peril thriller, Likeliness Will increase that the viewer may have given up on this arch, emotionless affair, during which the enveloping woods – scene of a lot of the motion – have accrued slightly extra symbolic weight than they will carry.

On the plus facet, Maestro and Tempo do click on convincingly, the latter’s moody, wry method and understanding supply evoking hints of a rougher, gruffer (and significantly hairier) John Malkovich. DoP Barton Cortright lays on some ominous, glossy atmospherics all through, and the music is from Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo – the latter doubling as costume designer. To the duo’s credit score, the band numbers are extra realistically convincing than we often hear in motion pictures about indie-style music acts, even when it defies perception that Elliott and Ronnie may have sustained a full 10 albums’ value of this dour electro-goth materials.