Here After
Connie Britton strives to inject some honesty and emotion into the monotonous and clichéd Here After, but this effort is quite limited.
This is US horror film, directed by Robert Salerno, who has produced other films such as, 21 Grams, A Single Man and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The movie features several cultural components as creepy child behavior, unresolved family drama and excessive Catholic style flashing. Salerno as a director uses a lot of tilting camera angles and has frequent rainfall during most of the scenes. Available scenes supporting his turn are plenty but also well known. Having contributed to so many original independent films including Vox Lux and Nocturnal Animals, it’s hard to understand why this is the story he wants to tell.
Directed by Britton Hiller, “Here After” tells the story of Claire Hiller, an American living in Rome, teaching at a girls school after the divorce. She has a teenage daughter named Robin (Freya Hannan Mills), a piano player and a dreamer hoping to get into one of the top conservatories in the world. Unfortunately, her extreme shyness qualifies her as a selective mute. Nonetheless, she is chipper conveying her thoughts through sign language and engaging in her ever-growing passion for music. All in all, there isn’t too much to her.
While Robin is on her way to a huge audition, she gets into a terrible bicycling accident (which took place in the rain, naturally). For twenty minutes, doctors will set her as medically dead. However, against all odds, she comes back alive but there are a few changes, to say the least. First of all, she has the ability to speak, a skill that went unused for the last ten years. What’s more, she begins acting quite differently, displaying an oddly rude attitude forcing her way to sit in front of the television or turn the music to an obnoxious volume her smirk grows mischievous, as shadows cover her eyes.
Is Robin a teenager under hormonal and emotional swings? Is she possessed? Or is Claire hallucinating herself? The only aspect that some may find appealing in the mother’s premonitions, which could have possibly been the twisting essence of the plot, is the possibility of it being the case quite early on in the movie until “Here After” shows a number of jump scares having been ignored all so far. Some emotional comfort comes from her colleague, Viv (Babetida Sadjo, a warm and welcome presence), but the role of Claire’s ex-husband (Giovanni Cirfiera) is simply banal. She visits a priest, letting us know that only “God can help.” This sudden twist, however, does not jolt the film with any kind of meaningful emotional impact or character shift, she has been wearing a giant cross around her neck from the first moment we see her, clearly, she would need to sit down and pray when in panic. But Britton is so good, even as she puts the finale components of frustration angle, makes sure that viewer sees no matter what in its root cause quite fantasy.
Britton excels in his craft, most noticeably in the climactic scenes of the film that contain little hostility, rather they seem surreal and totally different from what has gone before it. The timing in this part of the film is a bit slow for effective delivery making it feel like it is taking too long to get to the point. But Salerno Instead, Britton employs a method and collaborates with cinematographer Bartosz Nalazek, which makes one admire why he did not use a more adventurous strategy earlier in the film.
Brittan, on the contrary, does not possess such radical style and this mundane narrative of loss and redemption tends to be rather monotonous and detached, as one of the many average drone views of Rome which it provides.
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