After Death
If we were in a different universe, “After Death” would be garbage. It would come as a small white pamphlet, printed dutifully and stuffed with crazy stories that spill out of someone’s need to share their faith only for this paper to become another kind of trash. But we’re not living there; for some people involved in this project, the world is less real than an afterlife they say they’ve seen. So it’s a feature. And if you want to be generous, you might call it a documentary.
This weekend, “After Death” will play at more than 2,200 theaters nationwide and in Canada through Fathom Events and Angel Studios; it can’t be ignored. It also can’t be believed and barely works as an infomercial.
“After Death” is trying to sell you on one thing above all else: itself. The latest from Angel Studios (“Sound of Freedom”), the successful Christian indie movie distribution group that made box office history by asking people to donate money for other people to see it (and raising the movie’s box office total), makes that same pitch again during its end credits with co-director Stephen Gray speaking the same words (though edited differently) and with a QR code next to his face, as with Caviezel.
For a long time America has been the land of the most fantastic and comforting promises about things not of this world, the stuff we can’t verify until we die. An afterlife, pearly gates. “After Death” follows in this tradition with its Near Death Experiences that prove God and Heaven through incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled together.
Many of them have also written a bestselling book about death, as these credits remind us. Some have medical backgrounds. They talk about how there are no words on Earth to describe what they experience; the power of this documentary, or so it intends, is that it can make use of cinematic tools like swooping drone shots and “Oppenheimer” like balls of fire to actualize the intangible.
Their stories aren’t entirely unmovable at first. They are examples of unimaginable trauma, immense pain that can define a person. One man crashed a plane. Another was declared dead from extreme stomach problems. Another talks about a suicide attempt that led him to seeing God as a ball of light.
All of these people come back from these experiences with memories of being out of body or in some other realm more colorful, vibrant and louder than our own regular world even blind people have been able to see when presented with an afterlife like scenario only in accounts I’ve heard about somewhere else. While many seem well-familiar with sharing their stories they’re just always sitting there, adding to the project’s wonky grave self-seriousness with light shining on one side of their face “After Death” does not humanize them beyond their purpose to its message.
These stories are told by co-directors Gray and Chris Radtke with all the emotional tact you’d expect from summer blockbuster trailers: swelling strings, fast cuts and special effects heavy reenactments that hog most of the budget. The accounts are sometimes clunkily assembled so that we learn a little about one story, only to then hear another, and then another. Intercut interviews tell us how intense their respective pain was or how finalizing it should have been their experience becomes our sloppy spectacle.
Midway through this superficial project “After Death” thinks you’ve been sold on these transcendental experiences (and maybe you have). From there, it’s more about awe as it lets one man rip with his experience of near death, including how it made him want to be a better father and son. “After Death” is all about the spectacle and the emotion it can create from such an experience, and then curdles with a creepiness when it lets people talk for longer.
Don Piper, who previously told his story in a book called “90 Minutes in Heaven” that was also turned into 2015 feature adaptation says some things that illuminate what’s wrong with this thinking and its reckless promotion: “Nothing compares to Heaven. That is the most real thing. That is my reality.” And then he points to the floor and says, “This is not.”
A bad faith project like this needs skepticism; the gravity that brings lofty ideas down to earth (this one). It does so only slightly with words from one of its many medical professionals/bestselling authors.
To put it another way, it tends to turn skepticism on its head. What makes you doubt that these stories are not proofs? One is arguing for physical evidence while the other is arguing for belief in lights and choirs that cannot be seen or heard of as well (Here’s a real mind-bender for critical thinking: when another person talking about the same thing says “I don’t have any evidence that supports this but I also don’t have any evidence against it.”).
Piper does say one thing that rings true towards the end. “The death rate is 100%.” Yeah, everybody dies. You can’t argue with that. And you can currently purchase a $45 sweatshirt through Angel Studios’ website that features this fact.
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