BEFORE: OK, I'm back from a week in North Carolina. We spent one day at the N.C. State Fair and did a LOT of walking - like, too much because with the tools I had, I couldn't sit down with a proper map of the fairgrounds and work out the best path through all the booths to get the things I wanted to eat. I've been there before, so I kind of know my way around, and there was a list of the best new fair foods posted online, but in order to figure out where each booth was, I needed to take the name of the company that owns the booth (which is sometimes different from the posted name of the booth) and put it into a fairground search engine, which could only give me one location at a time. There were maybe 8 foods I was interested in, and four that I thought my wife would enjoy, but I didn't have a printer, so there was no chance to get a printed map before going to the fair, instead I had to prioritize my top two locations and her top two, and mentally think about which direction we were going to head after entering the fair. And where we entered was going to have everything to do with where we parked, and I just couldn't predict that. Luckily we parked in a free lot and took a shuttle-bus, which took us to gate 8, and we've come in that way before.
Another stroke of luck, in the first section we walked through, I spotted a couple of the items on my list, plus an ice-cream stand, so in my mind that was an exit strategy, head back toward the gate we walked in, get those last few items and/or ice cream, and then leave before the dinner or late-night crowd came in. So instead we headed for the center of the fair, and I found the booth with the breakfast sausage on a stick, dipped in waffle-batter, deep-fried, then covered with cheese, bacon and country gravy. YUM! My wife got some nachos with the exciting topping called "nacho cheese", and then I tracked down the fabled "BBQ donut", that's a donut filled with BBQ meat, covered with BBQ sauce and bacon crumbles. YUM again!
I wish they would number the booths and make everything easier to find, that's the way they do things at the Texas State Fair plus every Comic-Con I've ever been to - I shouldn't have to search by company name to find everything, plus the next thing I'm looking for could then be on the other side of the fair and it would take me an hour to walk over there. But if each booth had a number then I could have a better idea of each booth's location and I could have worked out a better path to hit more items. Just saying.
Beyond that, we visited my parents at my sister's house every day, talked with them or did crosswords or jigsaw puzzles with them, went through some old photo albums and such, tried to remember the names of some of their favorite restaurants and some stories from years past. They're both turning 84 this year, my mother's got dementia so sometimes she doesn't remember that her mother and sister have both passed on, sometimes she doesn't recognize her own grandchildren, you know, fun stuff like that. Which kind of leads me in a round-about way to tonight's movie, which is all about people dying and wondering what comes after, if anything. This, of course was not planned, except that the chain totally plans stuff like this to tie in with my life, or it's my subconscious sending me messages, still not sure which.
Rooney Mara carries over from "A Ghost Story". I'm going in tonight with that same sort of genre confusion, I'm not sure if this is a horror movie exactly, because IMDB lists it as a drama and a romance and a sci-fi film. So, um, what the hell is it, and does it belong in October or February? How can it be all of those things? Only one way to find out, and cross it off the list at the same time...
THE PLOT: Two years after the afterlife is scientifically proven, a man attempts to help a young woman break away from her dark past.
AFTER: A number of this year's Shocktober films have been dancing around the same subject, which is "What happens when we die?" and possible answers have come from "The Eye" and "A Ghost Story", to a lesser extent "Haunted Mansion" and "The Fog". But then there's also "What happens when we dream?" which was broken down in "Dream Scenario" and "Awake", and then there's "What happens when we forget stuff?" as seen in "Blink Twice" and "I Lost My Body".
Now we've got a film that puts the notion out there that we know so little about how the human brain works, including what constitutes a "soul", if there is one, that maybe all of those things are tied together somehow, and perhaps there's a unified theory of sorts that might explain how the universe works with regards to human life and a possible after-life. Of course, we could just fall back on Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation for things is quite possibly correct, and there's nothing more simple than we die and we cease to exist and our soul goes nowhere because there's no such thing, whatever energy we had just dies too, like what good is the gas in the tank if the car doesn't work?
But let's roll with what this film has to say for the moment - there's a scientist who has found the way to track the energy that leaves the body right after death, so let's say soul particles, for lack of a better term. They go somewhere, but he can't really tell where, however this is enough for most people to prove the existence of an afterlife. And that "proof" alone is enough for people to start committing suicide in mass numbers, because they're anxious to get to whatever's on the other side, sure, let's go, the sooner the better, you know this will also have the benefit of preserving the Earth's resources for a while longer, another couple of generations perhaps, so really, it's a win-win. Well, except for a couple of things.
Proving that energy, or the soul, leaves the body is not really tacit proof that it GOES somewhere constructive. What if it just wanders around like a ghost, but isn't able to accomplish anything? What if it flies up into the cosmos and spends years floating through space until it gets sucked into that black hole in the galaxy's center, where the energy is burnt up or recycled or used as fuel in another dimension? We only know what we know, and once upon a time, people tried to weigh a human body at the moment of death to find out how much a soul weighs, and again, this seems like a B.S. experiment because it assumes things not in evidence, and you can't really answer the question before you ask it, or believe your process is spot-on when it isn't, so you may find out the hard way that the universe doesn't work the way you think it does.
I had some stressful dreams over the last week, part of that may be because I was sleeping in different motel rooms, not in my standard position, plus I was spending time with my parents and looking at old photos, so that was sure to jog something loose. Also I wasn't watching movies, and sometimes movies are stand-ins for dreams and vice versa - without my daily movie (like watching other people's dreams) my brain came up with its own during the night. Makes sense. Our best guess these days is that dreams are our brain's way of sorting out the day's events, or working out different possible life scenarios, good and bad. Most of us don't remember them for long, so then, come on, what's the point of all that? Ah, but we're assuming there IS a point to them, which again, is something we could be trying to prove instead of assuming it to be true.
We follow Will, the son of the man who proved the afterlife (and therefore caused 4 million suicides) as he travels on a ferry to his father's island - it's never good when a scientist or a tech guy has an island, remember? He meets a young woman named Isla on the ferry and they hit it off, later on he learns that she has come to the island JUST to commit suicide, and he stops her from doing that. Will learns that a bunch of formerly suicidal people live at the compound with his father, and work as lab techs and medical assistants and whatever, also he learns that his father has been clinically dead several times, as he's researching what's on the other side. Look, we know that several people have reported seeing an afterlife while temporarily "dead", but here's where we don't know what might be real and what might be a dream and what might be a fantasy created by their bodies shutting down, even temporarily. Some combination of religion and science may someday be able to explain all of this, but they'd have to start working together, like chocolate and peanut butter, and so far they've been mutually exclusive.
"Life is but a dream" is something we've all heard, but often when people say they're "living the dream" they're being sarcastic. I shouldn't be looking to language to solve the afterlife riddle, but what else can I do? Do we think that dreams give us a peek at the afterlife? Do we think people who die temporarily and remember the afterlife were just dreaming about it? Where ARE we on the science of death, anyway? Can we get religion and science to work together, or is that just a fantasy, too?
Anyway, the way Will sees it, his father has assembled something like a death cult of followers, which, you know, is good because it tips the scales here a bit more toward a horror movie. But then Will's dad invents a machine that can not only look through the portal, but capture images from it - essentially it's reading the dreams of the dead in video form - and what it records is something that looks like memories, only they're not 100% accurate, something is different, and it tends to be related to some mistake that the person made while alive, only in the dream/afterlife this mistake is corrected. So, we put it all together, and what results here is a form of reincarnation, whatever our biggest regret is, in the next life we get to fix that and move on in the changed timeline, we still have to live out the rest of that life, but it's hopefully with a better result, and then I suppose whatever regret we have in THAT life gets corrected in the following one, and so on. We don't go back to the embryonic stage and have to live our whole life exactly the same again until we get to the critical juncture, the universe kind of resets itself to just before the fateful decision (or whatever) and we'll remember JUST enough about our previous life to make a better decision this time around. Well, that's all just a little too convenient, if you ask me. But it's a big problem with the other suggested forms of reincarnation, which suggest that if you lived a good life maybe in the next one you get to be a happy dog, but if you were a bad person then in the next one you only get to be a mosquito or a fruit fly or something with a very short life-span.
Well, without proof it's as good a theory as any other, of course there's also the one where our souls wear white robes and halos and float around and learn to play the harp - or any of the countless variations on that. Still, there are many logistic questions unresolved, like where exactly IS this other dimension, and how do our souls get there, or is everything imaginary, including the reality we're all in right now? And if we're all stuck in a bunch of infinite loops, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do we want to stop that, and if so, how? Or, as I said before, is the simplest explanation for how life and death works the easiest one to fall back on?
This is not the final film that Robert Redford made, four more came out after this one, including "Our Souls at Night" and "The Old Man & the Gun". However, this is the first film of his I've seen after he passed away, and it's all about dying and the afterlife, so I don't know, it feels like there's a tie-in there, or there would be if the depiction of life as one giant "Groundhog Day" scenario weren't so far-fetched. Really the film is about the lies we tell ourselves about how the universe works so we're able to get through the day, but since we'll probably NEVER know the answers to these questions, are they really lies if they can't be proven or unproven?
Directed by Charlie McDowell (director of "Windfall" and "The One I Love")
Also starring Jason Segel (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Robert Redford (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Ron Canada (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Hope Springs" (2003), Brian McCarthy (last seen in "Like Father"), Connor Ratliff (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024)), M.J. Karmi, Kimleigh Smith (last seen in "Bad Words"), Willie C. Carpenter (last seen in "Monster"), Wendy Makkena (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Adam Khaykin, Paul Bellefeuille, Richard O'Rourke (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile")
RATING: 5 out of 10 bodies in the morgue (be sure to pick a GOOD one)
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