Hereafter

Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter took some heat for its misrepresentative ad campaign, but I can’t imagine how the studio could have coherently sold a film that opens with a Roland Emmerich-style action sequence, segues into a smooth jazz riff on Iñárritu’s pan-global guiltfests, and eventually descends into New Age drippiness. The script by Oscar winner Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) teasingly cuts between three seemingly unrelated characters—a French newswoman changed by her near-death experience, a fragile London child grieving for his dead twin and a lonely San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon) who grudgingly talks to the dead. Other than an opening scene of CGI tsunami devastation that uncomfortably mirrors recent events, the sepia tone of somnambulant ambivalence that permeates Hereafter is pure Eastwood. The film seems to argue that unspeakable tragedies happen so that the prettiest people in the movie can find each other.