Released Year: 2009
Directed by Agnieszka Wójtowicz-Vosloo
Casted by:
Christina Ricci as Anna Taylor
Liam Neeson as Eliot Deacon
Justin Long as Paul Coleman
Story:
Middle school teacher Anna Taylor is unhappy with her life. She has a selfish, unloving mother, Beatrice, and a boyfriend, Paul Coleman, who cannot seem to figure her out.
A corpse is in the process of being prepared for a funeral; the man preparing the corpse speaks to it mysteriously, but cheerily. He takes a photo, and the scene fades. Anna is introduced along with Paul, as they finish having sex. She appears unaffected and cold, while he is frustrated with her lack of interest. Later, after school, a young boy she teaches, Jack, asks her as she is leaving to the funeral, if he could come along. He says his mother, who had neglected to pick him up from school, would not mind. Confused, she attempts to explain that funerals are a personal occasion. Jack offers that he has never been to a funeral before, but she insists it would be inappropriate. The funeral is revealed to be for her recently deceased music teacher, the corpse from the initial scene. There, Anna encounters the solemn owner of the funeral home, Eliot Deacon. One night, Anna meets Paul for dinner, not realizing he is going to propose to her and ask her to move to Chicago with him for a job promotion. Paul begins ambiguously, so Anna assumes the worst. Before Paul has a chance to explain, she panics, thinking he's breaking up with her. After a short argument in the restaurant, Anna storms out and drives off passionately. She has an accident while trying to use her cell phone and drive in the rain, while a mysterious white Van is seen on the road alongside.
Anna wakes up dazed, confused and numb. She finds the morgue director, Eliot, cleaning her wound and telling her she has died. He appears frustrated with her, explaining that all dead people claim to be alive just because they, "breathe and piss and shit." He tells her he has a gift, to assist the dead crossing over; to help them accept their deaths. Later in the funeral home, Eliot is revealed to have a collection of photographs of corpses, it is implied that he helped each to cross over, and speaks to them, implying a level of mental instability. Unwilling to accept her potential death, Anna clings onto life. Eliot injects her regularly with a chemical to "relax the muscles and keep rigor mortis from setting in."
Paul, unable to fully accept her death, asks Eliot if he could see her one last time; however, Eliot cannot, by law, show the body to anyone but family. Paul becomes quite angry, but leaves. Attempting to gain access to her, he pleads with friends in the police, who are sympathetic but unwilling. Anna is revealed not to have been taken to a hospital, rather pronounced dead at the scene and shipped to the funeral home. At an unknown funeral service, Eliot encounters Jack. They speak for a moment, during which Jack admits he had thought the funeral had been for Anna. As she still grapples with the concept of her own death, Anna attempts to escape several times but is unsuccessful; Eliot tells her she must let go of life, she had not really been living anyway. Eventually, she steals Eliot's keys, escapes, and finds a room with a phone, intent on calling Paul for help. Paul is unable to hear her properly and hangs up thinking it's a prank. Anna finally accepts she's dead, when Eliot allows her to look at herself in the mirror. She is horrified to find she looks like a corpse. Peculiarly, she leaves fog on the mirror from her breathing, which Eliot quickly wipes away with a handkerchief before she can see. Outside, Eliot spots Jack, gazing up at Anna. In a scene in his home, Jack's apparently negligent mother is shown to be sitting with a grotesque appearance, staring at the television set. At school he tells Paul he saw Anna, which sends Paul into a rage, hitting the boy. Upon confronting Eliot, Jack is told he has the same gift: the ability to see those between life and death as they really are. Eliot tells the boy that the first person he saw was his mother, alluding to Jack's ambiguously stoic mother. Over time, Paul becomes ever more paranoid as to whether or not Anna really is dead; he becomes suspicious of Eliot.
During the final preparation for the funeral, Anna asks Eliot if she can see herself one last time in the mirror. Eliot holds up a small mirror, but while she stares at herself, she exhales and notices her breath condensing on the glass. Suddenly concerned that Eliot has been lying to her, she begins to believe she has been alive all along. Disappointed that she had come so close to accepting her death yet failed, Eliot grimly injects her one last time with chemicals to make her numb. It is seen that Eliot is in fact injecting Anna with Hydronium Bromide, a chemical mentioned earlier as being able to induce conditions that mimic death.
In the graveyard while digging Anna's grave with Jack, Eliot explains that there are many corpses walking around with "no life left inside them," and because only they can see them, it is their responsibility to help them into the grave. It is never fully revealed whether this is metaphorical or literal, yet Jack at least appears to take it very literally. A particularly sickly little chick he is instructed to look after as a school assignment, is finally put into a paper box makeshift coffin and buried alive by the boy in order to spare it the pain of living "without truly living" (due to its illness).
After the funeral, Paul drinks alcohol heavily, telling Eliot he knew Anna was not dead. Anna is shown awakening to the sound of earth being shoveled onto her coffin. She cries out as she struggles against death, desperately scratching the satin lining of her coffin lid until her fingers are bloody. As she slowly dies of suffocation, Eliot offers that Paul should go to the cemetery and find out whether Anna is actually dead or not, before it's too late. Paul rushes to the cemetery, driving too fast and under the influence of alcohol. There is another ambiguous cut before he is shown to have dug up Anna's grave, to find her alive. They embrace and Anna tells him "she has always loved him." As they hug, Paul is curious about some rather unusual sounds he hears; Anna explains it's the sound of Eliot's gloves and scissors on the table as he prepares Paul's body. Paul sees Anna literally disappear from his embrace, then sees the bright flash of headlights by the cemetery. A moment later, he finds himself in the funeral home with Eliot preparing his body. He says he saw Anna, but Eliot tells him he never made it to the cemetery due to a car accident that killed him. Paul claims just as vehemently as Anna that he is not dead, as they begin preparing his body, protesting that he is alive until the moment Eliot inserts the trocar deeply into Paul's torso, an act which very obviously ends his life.
L² Scored: 6/10
L² Comment:
I like the idea of this story, talking about human being die and their spirit still thinks that they are alive. But as the movie goes by, the story started to become so bored as most of the time there is only Ricci, Neeson & Long inside the movie, even Ricci shows her ugly body wont help...
