Revenge of the Revenant Review: The one with a zombie ex-girlfriend

 

Title: Life After Beth

What Year?: 2014

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

After doing my “main” list for Halloween, I’ve been debating what I want to do with this feature. In the process, I’ve continuing looking at more movies I didn’t get to or simply didn’t think of the first time around. This time, I’m back with a movie that I already waited longer than usual since my most recent viewing to review. What’s even stranger is that I genuinely didn’t even think of it when first planning the feature. (Compare with Splinter, which I noted as the latest under consideration at that point.) It will stand out further as the first movie I’ve covered here from after 2010, in fact possibly the first time I’ve reviewed any movie less than 10 years old since my doomed efforts at animation reviews. Finally, it represents possibly the most conceptually sophisticated, well-cast and genuinely heartfelt treatment of genre among any films under consideration, which unfortunately says more about its disappointments than its success.

Our story begins with our protagonist Zach mourning the death of his girlfriend Beth Slocum, whom we learn had broken up with him or at least gone on break before her demise. He still gets support and sympathy from her father, Maury, but not so much from his own parents and his paranoid brother Kyle. Soon, however, the Slocums become secretive, and when he makes his way in, he discovers Beth alive and well, seemingly unaware that anything has happened to her. Her parents insist that she has returned from the dead through what they accept as a miracle, though they are clearly unwilling to let it be investigated by others or even known to Beth herself. Soon enough, it becomes clear that Beth is not quite herself and already going downhill. At the same time, she demonstrates disconcerting feats of strength, usually too absent-mindedly to notice the consequences, even as her outward appearance deteriorates. Meanwhile, other deceased people begin reappearing, including Zach’s own grandfather, and the living prove unprepared to deal with undead who don’t quite understand what the fuss is about.

Life After Beth was written and directed by independent filmmaker Jeff Baena, with his partner Aubrey Plaza of Parks And Rec as the title character and Dane Dehaan as Zach. The star-studded supporting cast included John C. Reilly as Maury, Molly Shannon as Beth’s mother Geenie, and Matthew Gray Gubler of Criminal Minds as Kyle, with Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines appearing as Zach’s parents and Anna Kendrick as rebound romantic interest Erica. The movie was filmed in late 2013 and released in limited theatrical distribution and disk the following year. Most reviews were mixed.

This movie is one that I have a very immediate history with. I first heard of it during its limited run, which must have included some local theaters because the newspaper reviewed it. It came out just before Halloween that year, and as far as I can recall, I bought it as soon it was available in stores with what I considered the last of my money. Shortly after that, I showed it to a group of very close friends, one of whom had just gone through a breakup. At the time, I was very impressed with the movie, while those who watched it with me seemed to like it well enough. However, I eventually discovered another friend I was sure had watched it with me has no memory of the movie, which just might be getting to the heart of the problem.

What I can still say after years of repeat viewings is that this movie excels as long as it works at all. Its take on the genre wasn’t quite as original as the creators seem to have thought, with notable similarities to Dead of Night and Shatterdead (both strongly considered but deferred for inclusion here). However, any further comparisons are certainly in its favor, especially considering how jaw-droppingly strange the other films already were. It takes the zombie apocalypse out of the well-worn metaphorical framework of social breakdown and turns it into an equally potent representation of personal grief, all with the full support of top-notch acting and dialogue. Even its awkward or clunky moments (definitely including the handful of scenes between Zach and Erica) generally feel like universal human experiences gone further awry in the film’s assumed world.

Inevitably, the naturalistic approach brings further hits and misses. Maury is charming in his despondency, with a darker controlling streak that predominates toward the end, while Geenie is energized in her excitement and growing denial over Beth’s return. By comparison, Zach is mostly self-centered; he is thoughtful enough to look deeper into the phenomenon but still mostly preoccupied with whether Beth will try to eat him. That leads to his and the movie’s low point, when he seeks out a minor character solely for her ethnic/ cultural background. The sucker punch surprise is Gubler’s horrifying yet delightful turn, beginning as an ordinary obsessive-compulsive and transforming quite enthusiastically into an unhinged survivalist. In many ways, the movie’s greatest weakness is that this all comes naturally enough not to notice just how far it goes beyond the usual horizons of the genre. However, there is also a potentially variable but real point where all the manic energy starts to cancel itself out, and where that falls for the individual viewer is likely to determine whether one can stay with the story to the end.

On closer analysis, the weak link Beth herself. To begin with, we never learn much about her life prior to reanimation, so we don’t have a lot to go on for the speed and degree of her transformation. She also tends to come across as oddly passive, easily controlled most of the time and entirely incurious about her predicament, which isn’t solidly explained and simply doesn’t fit Plaza’s usual style or evident personality. A further consequence is that the events of the story tend to happen around her, driven more by others’ reactions to her than anything she does. One further problem is that the movie makes her degeneration too straightforward to be as potent as it could be. Her earlier scenes will ring all too true to those who have dealt with mental illness and dementia firsthand, but apart from a jealous turn when she perceives Erica as a threat, we never see the spiteful and manipulative behavior that the afflicted can still be capable of. Instead, she descends straight to the level of a standard cannibalistic revenant, which still leaves some very effective moments (especially when Geenie desperately tries to feed her) but nothing new for the genre.

It should therefore be telling that my choice for the “one scene” is the one that has the least to do with Beth. On returning from the escalating drama at the Slocum household, Zach enters his own home, only to find that his departed grandfather has returned. Kyle (clad only in a towel) is ready to shoot him (again!), while their parents try to talk him down. It’s here that Reiser, still best known for Mad About You and his villainous turn in Aliens before that, finally gets enough room to display his undoubted talent. All the while, the grandfather (played by the late Garry Marshall in his final screen appearance) is merely indignant at the behavior of his grandchildren, whom he quite casually addresses by childhood nicknames. When he announces his intent to retreat upstairs, Zach casually comments, “They like attics.” Then, at the peak of the madness, they are interrupted by the arrival of the house’s former owners, who loudly declare that they paid $28,000 for the place. At that point, Reiser responds with perfect deadpan delivery, “When?”

Overall, this is a movie I still personally like. However, even I can no longer regard it as highly as I once did, to the point that I came close to giving it a lower rating than I did. The most useful service movies like this offer is as a reminder that home video is still a relatively new development. Before that paradigm-shifting breakthrough, the best any movie could hope for was one indelible impression on the viewer, and perhaps independent films still do that better than “mainstream” counterparts. If even a film as thoughtful as this one doesn’t hold up so well after repeated viewing, perhaps the lesson is that some movies shouldn’t have to.