🎬 2025 Movie #17 | After Life (1998)

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This blog is a personal journal of all the movies, Tv-Shows, & Games I consume during a year which enhances my overall experience. The ratings that I give are fully based on my personal preference and enjoyment at the time of watching and I'm writing spoiler-free reviews.

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So last evening, I was looking for something to watch and having quite some time I wanted to binge a relatively short 6 Episode Series with The White Lotus as I heard good things about it while there currently is some hype around season 3. However, after not getting it to work on my tv opting to watch on my Laptop and 30 minutes into the episode I pretty much knew it was not going to be something that would blow me away so I didn't want to waste the time on it. I got kind of Desperate Housewives vibes which just isn't fully my thing even though it was filmed really nicely in a great location. So I had a couple other options and choose for the movie that I least would mind to spoil as it was getting late and I was a bit tired. So instead of A Silent Voice which is high on my Watchlist and where I want to be fully ready for, I went for the 1998 film After Life from Director Hirokazu Koreeda. It's one of the directors I kind of know I will really enjoy many movies of while so far I only watched his most recent film monster which I very much enjoyed. I kind of assumed that After Life was a ~97 minute movie but it came at 120 Minutes which I knew was going to be a challenge.

After Life (7.5/10)

This is a movie were a single plot line already stopped me cold and made me go totally wild in my head. I don't think any other movie has done this so far for me.

Spoiler-Free Movie Plot:

"After death, people have a week to choose only one memory to keep for eternity."

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Over the course of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a gate between life and death. They are guided to choose and recreate one memory which they can take with them to their next life. So the film starts with a bunch of interviews where each of the individuals tells their story which comes with a lot of talking and the need to read many subtitles while at the same time I was more interested in my own thoughts on the subject. This really distracted me from the start of the movie and also made it harder to follow later on as I missed parts. However, this didn't take anything away from the powerful message that this movie brings over. I didn't really relate to any of the characters, I never got the Japanese vibes which I generally love, the music also wasn't anything special, but all of that was just fully forgiven by the simple plot concept of this movie.

After over an hour of mostly interviews with the 22 different people each telling their story and trying to find the memory they want, they started to recreate the memories after which each one individually could move on. To be honest, I really got distracted and missed a large part of this movie, but this didn't really keep me from fully getting the message and understanding everything. In the end, almost everyone chose small seemingly meaningless things in life as a memory to take with them and so did I while doing the though experiment which in a way really was eye opening.

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I don't think this is a movie you really need to watch for the 2-hour lenght to get the most out of it. Just sitting down an thinking about the question and watching a Youtube Video about the concept of the movie for me did way more than the actual movie itself.

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So while I wasn't really blown away by the movie itself, the concept of the plot ifself is just extremely strong and made this a movie that will forever stick with me. So it gets a 7.5/10 for me as a nice average!

#	2025 Watched Movies	Score
#01	Heretic	7.8/10
#02	A Different Man	6.9/10
#03	Look Back	6.9/10
#04	Caddo Lake	7.5/10
#05	Sing Sing	6.0/10
#06	Paris, Texas	9.2/10
#07	The Greatest Night In Pop	7.2/10
#08	Sometimes I Think About Dying	7.3/10
#09	Memory Lane (De Terugreis)	6.8/10
#10	Winter In Sokcho	7.6/10
#11	On Falling	6.8/10
#12	Carry-On	6.9/10
#13	The Brutalist	6.6/10
#14	Dune Part Two	6.1/10
#15	Companion	7.8/10
#16	Under The Silver Lake	7.2/10
#17	After Life	7.5/10

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