Whether it was his choice or one dictated by production financing, “Life After Beth” contents itself with taking that road well traveled to a genre of film that has been shot, bludgeoned and beaten to death. Then, unfortunately, it settles into the mundane genre picture that it seems doomed to be. “Life After Beth” attracted a good cast - Garry Marshall is a grandparent, Anna Kendrick shows up as “a girl I knew from childhood” - and this dark comedy has a lot of promise for about half its length. Plaza (“Parks and Recreation”) on the other hand, is all-in for this romp, veering between dopey and demented. He’s not questioning that.ĭeHaan doesn’t get across Zach’s grief in the early scenes or his desperate denial in the later ones. Beth, for a while at least, is the most fun she’s ever been and they can’t get enough of each other. He must have seen “Twilight” or “The Walking Dead.” What’s clever here is how he ignores what he’s figuring out and what the adults may not be telling him.

Her mom can’t stop taking pictures of her, urging them to go off and, you know, be alone. And her parents are acting just as strange. Musically, she can only tolerate smooth jazz. She’s volatile, violent and sexually insatiable.

She has no memory of being dead, and since she’s played by Aubrey Plaza, that means a lot of eye-rolling. “Go! Say everything you meant to say to her!”īut Beth? She’s DIFFERENT. All those things he never got to tell her? “Life After Beth” - the title is a pun - is about Zach’s comical confusion about how to react to this heart-wrenching loss that no longer counts as a loss. Maybe they’re trying to free their daughter from this lunatic boy she’s in love with. A grift would be odd and kind of funny, maybe an insurance scam or something. “What kind of grift is this?” the kid demands of his dead-now-alive girlfriend’s father. The college boy’s unhealthy fixation, the adults’ insistence on moving on, the girls’ desire for escape.Īnd when Beth reappears, there are still plenty of options as to where this could go. Jeff Baena’s “Life After Beth” has a variety of fascinating directions it can head off in at this point. They give him a woolen scarf, which he wears in the summer. Zach grows more morose and more obsessed. Heck, Morty (Reilly) even shares one of Beth’s joints with him as they play chess into the wee hours, fretting over the last words each said to her before that fateful hike. Reilly, Molly Shannon) may be barely maintaining a brave face, they make time to comfort him.

His parents (Cheryl Hines, Paul Reiser) are ready to move on to “Life After Beth.” They talk up vacation plans. But his girlfriend put in her earbuds, trekked off up into the hills, and…something happened.īecause we meet Zach (Dane DeHaan) after her funeral.

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