Life After Beth

Being in love with the liv­ing dead has become a recur­ring cin­e­mat­ic phe­nom­e­non of late, with more and more folk see­ing dead peo­ple. Not since Patrick Swayze’s beyond-the-grave utter­ance of the word ​‘dit­to’ has the sil­ver screen seen such an influx of roman­tic para­nor­mal activ­i­ty. From Twilight’s noc­tur­nal necrophil­ia to Jonathan Levine’s lik­able Warm Bod­ies, rela­tion­ships with the after-life are alive and well.

Jeff Baena’s direc­to­r­i­al debut is a teen love sto­ry with a twist — Beth is dead. Mourn­ing the sud­den loss of his girl­friend Beth Slocum (Aubrey Plaza), incon­solable boyfriend Zach (Dane DeHaan) can hard­ly believe his luck when, quite inex­plic­a­bly, she comes back from the dead. His ​‘busi­ness as usu­al’ approach to resum­ing their rela­tion­ship is thwart­ed as it tran­spires she came back wrong, illus­trat­ed for the most part by her insa­tiable sex­u­al appetite and an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic pen­chant for smooth jazz.

Edgar Wright’s Shaun of The Dead paved the way for a styl­ish new hor­ror sub-genre: the rom zom com. Maxed out with metaphor, the satir­i­cal nature of such films give a know­ing wink and nod to ardent buffs of genre cin­e­ma. But noth­ing has quite lived up to Wright’s self-con­scious apoc­a­lypse, and Life After Beth con­tin­ues this trend. With its dis­tinct absence of irony and lit­tle going on under the sur­face, the film makes for a hol­low view­ing expe­ri­ence, saved in part by its charis­mat­ic cast.

Parks & Rec fun­ny­girl Aubrey Plaza is per­fect as Beth, like some kind of wide-eyed odd­ball love child of Zooey Deschanel and Steve Busce­mi. Plaza brings a col­li­sion of her already-estab­lished per­sonas; pret­ty slack­er meets man­ic pix­ie dream girl (with man­ic being the oper­a­tive word) in a seem­ing­ly com­i­cal ham-up of Lin­da Blair’s turn as pos­sessed pre-Exor­cism Regan.

Mae­stro of monot­o­ne, Dane DeHaan, had recent­ly been mak­ing waves as The Amaz­ing Spiderman’s scene-steal­ing Green Gob­lin. His poten­tial here is, again, bound­less as the eeri­ly mes­meris­ing Zach. Indie com­e­dy alum­ni John C Reil­ly and Mol­ly Shan­non are under used as Beth’s hope­less par­ents, but nev­er­the­less, their pres­ence is wel­come. Anna Kendrick com­pletes the promis­ing line-up, mak­ing an all-too-brief appear­ance as poten­tial liv­ing love inter­est, Eri­ca, who gen­er­ates some smirk-wor­thy lines from Zach who becomes tempt­ed by the fact that, unlike Beth, Eri­ca has a pulse — ​‘I can, like, breathe through my nose around you’.

It’s hard to see where Baera went wrong while in pos­ses­sion of all the ingre­di­ents of a by-the-num­bers kooky com­e­dy. But its unin­spir­ing, aim­less plot is the film’s down­fall, in what, mid-way through, turns into an unin­ten­tion­al par­o­dy of TV’s supe­ri­or super­nat­ur­al nail-biter ​‘Les Revenants’ (The Returned). Baera’s co-penned the script I Heart Huck­abees was refresh­ing for its screw­ball orig­i­nal­i­ty. Life After Beth is as life­less as they come.