HERE AFTER (2024)

Studio:   Paramount Pictures
Director: Robert Salerno
Writer:   Sarah Conradt
Producer: Robert Salerno, Naomi Despres, Sukee Chew, Christopher Tricarico
Stars:    Connie Britton, Freya Hannan-Mills, Giovanni Cirfiera, Tommaso Basili, Alessandro Riceci, Andrea Bruschi, Babetida Sadjo, Syama Rayner, Carlotta Proietti

Review Score:

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Summary:

Following a near-death experience, a teenage girl's bizarre behavior compels her mother to confront a terrible trauma buried in their family's past.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Claire, a Catholic schoolteacher living in Italy, rushes to the hospital when her teenage daughter Robin, a mute piano prodigy, is critically injured in a bike accident. Claire picks up a keepsake bracelet dropped by Robin and prays with it in the hospital's chapel. Claire and her estranged ex-husband Luca return to Robin's room where their daughter is pronounced dead. Claire puts the bracelet around Robin's wrist and she suddenly comes back to life despite being brain dead for 20 minutes.

Robin begins speaking for the first time since she was five years old. However, Robin also begins exhibiting unusual behavior both at home and at school, including choking a classmate, which gets her expelled. At the same time, Claire begins seeing strange visions, such as imagining insults written on papers turned in by her students, and an old scar on her forearm starts bleeding again.

Claire takes Robin back to the hospital for additional testing, but Dr. Stancik finds nothing unusual. While discussing her near-death experience on their drive home, Robin cryptically asks Claire, "How come you didn't ask if I saw her?" Claire tells Luca about Robin's question, but Luca dismisses it by claiming Robin doesn't remember the unidentified incident.

Claire turns to Father Sergio for the church's help dealing with Robin, but the priest merely contacts Luca. Luca ends up taking Robin to live with his new family temporarily.

Claire attends a support group for survivors of near-death experiences. As part of a debate about the afterlife being a place of light or a place of darkness, group leader Dr. Ben Romano indicates the hereafter is often associated with repressed emotional trauma.

A vision of Robin seemingly attempts to drown Claire in a pool. Claire's confused friend Viv rescues her. Luca soon calls Claire to let her know Robin went missing.

Recent events compel Claire to revisit a traumatic memory. Claire recalls how she drove away with her twin daughters Robin and Rose when they were five years old after a marriage-ending argument with Luca. Frustrated by Rose's backseat tantrum, Claire swerved to avoid a collision and drove into water. Claire managed to save Robin, but Rose drowned. The incident left Claire with a forearm scar while Robin went mute.

Claire returns to Dr. Ben Romano. Claire asks Ben if guilt and past sins can become demons as she theorizes Robin somehow brought Rose back from the other side. Claire mentions how her family never talks about Rose, as though she didn't exist.

Having been located, Robin is brought to the hospital in a comatose state with her body decomposing. Meanwhile, Claire prepares to commit suicide by overdosing on pills and submerging herself in an ice bath.

Claire's suicide attempt triggers a near-death experience where she relives the car accident with her twin daughters. In the vision, Claire reunites with Rose, which leads to another moment where two Claires embrace each other as a symbol of Claire forgiving herself. Claire clutches Rose's bracelet, which she subsequently gave to Robin. After all three of them embrace, Rose puts Claire and Robin's hands together before turning to walk back to the water in the hereafter.

Worried because she didn't answer her phone, Ben rushes to Claire's place with paramedics who revive her. Simultaneously, Robin miraculously recovers in the hospital. Everyone's lives return to normal in the aftermath.

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Review:

"Here After" models itself as a "classy" dramatic thriller. The film takes place in Italy. The first scene depicts a teenage prodigy's piano recital where marble sculptures adorn the stage and men in suits applaud appreciatively. The piano player's mother, Claire, teaches poetry at a private school for girls. And when Claire's daughter Robin dies fifteen minutes into the movie, sad violin strains swell on the moodily melancholic soundtrack. In short, you won't sniff a whiff of horror hallmarks like partying teenagers, masked maniacs, undead creatures, or bloody chainsaws anywhere near "Here After."

Get ready to get to know Claire through a series of similarly sophisticated, similarly sleep-inducing situations. As a healthy hobby, Claire partakes in swimming sessions with her inessential friend Viv. When she's not consulting her parish's pastor for advisement, Claire attends group therapy meetings for survivors of near-death experiences. To prove how compassionate she is compared to her estranged ex-husband Luca, Claire repeatedly visits her dementia-afflicted father-in-law in an assisted living facility, even though he doesn't recognize her. You wouldn't want to accompany a real relative if she insisted on taking you along for such mundane chores, so I'm not sure why director Robert Salerno and screenwriter Sarah Conradt think an audience would willfully engage with any of this, either.

When Robin ends up in critical condition following a bike accident, Claire turns to the power of prayer, and those prayers seemingly do the trick. After being clinically dead for 20 minutes, Robin miraculously returns to life. She can even speak again, something she hasn't done since she was five years old. But the celebration shouldn't start too soon, because Robin also exhibits bizarre behavior, suggesting she may have brought an uninvited guest back with her from the afterlife.

Before anyone starts sighing about "Here After" shaping up to be yet another demonic possession dud or "Jacob's Ladder" rehash, those fears can be safely laid to rest. You'll be begging for a head to swivel 360 degrees when you discover "Here After" doesn't even have formulaic frights going for it. Chock full of crucifixes, religious iconography, and multiple trips to church, "Here After" builds on a foundation of Christian themes for a Lifetime-level story of grief, guilt, and restoring one's family through faith. Arguably admirable in those intentions, it's harder to argue that "Here After" is ever eerie, exciting, or entertaining.

Robin's "disturbing" actions include an incident with an injured bird where she may or may not kill it using her bare hands (she doesn't), shocking Claire by using a curse word, and supposedly choking a classmate during an offscreen conflict behind a closed door. Meanwhile, Claire experiences imaginary visions such as seeing tame insults like "liar" and "coward" scrawled on her students' papers and being momentarily submerged underwater by a phantom hand. Troubling moments all around, but hardly terrifying when the most likely urge for a viewer will be to stifle a yawn rather than a gasp.

It's odd for a Catholic-forward movie like this to portray the priest as the most useless person during Claire's desperate search for help. Yet all he does is call Claire's ex to take custody of their troubled daughter for a spell, prompting Claire to turn to a twelve-step doctor whose counsel compels her to confront a terrible family tragedy. Doing so causes Claire to reexamine her role as the failed parent she sees herself as. Facing that fear then offers reflective clarity when she experiences a near-death experience of her own, affording an opportunity for forgiveness that ultimately allows everyone to live happily ever after.

Everyone, that is, except anyone who heard "Here After's" premise and expected anything resembling a scare, a surprise, or genuine suspense. "Here After" has none of those things, clocking in at 90 minutes of inconsequential activity ready-made for insomniacs who use cable TV triviality as a sleep aid. Too high brow for an outright DTV dump, yet not high-end enough to earn a nod from Netflix or another streaming service, "Here After" drifts into a limbo where the movie might have been better off dead than ever trying to resuscitate it at all.

Review Score: 40

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