At least in Return it hurt when they began experiencing rigor mortis. I can go with that, even if Life After Beth doesn’t even begin to think through its own premise (Beth has been autopsied, for example, but nobody really mentions it. Beth comes back as a fully functioning human who begins to decompose - shades of Return of the Living Dead. While we’re on the subject of flesh-eating monsters: what is Life After Beth’s zombie concept even supposed to be? The film is a mish-mash of different versions of zombies, none of which work well together. Zach is basically a put-upon saint whose biggest flaw is that he loves his girlfriend too much, while Beth is a literal flesh-eating monster. Basically the thematic element here is “Don’t get back together with your ex because it turns out she really is a monster,” which will probably appeal to the (500) Days of Summer crowd, but which will make any whole-souled human in the audience uncomfortable. One of the most frustrating things about Life After Beth is how it short shrifts Beth. She deserves better, and the Beth character deserves more. Plaza gets some scenes where she’s playing a character who isn’t the usual Aubrey Plaza character, but her mental dissipation means that she gets snotty and aggressive over time, basically morphing into her Parks & Rec character. There’s an interesting kernel here - you wake up and know something is wrong but aren’t sure what. I wonder if the original script was written for teen actors but when these name actors - who could secure some funding - came aboard the characters were aged up while everything else stayed the same.Īubrey Plaza is fine as Beth, and I was left wondering why we weren’t seeing this story more from her point of view.
#Life after beth movie movie
That works for a kid who never consummated his relationship and whose girlfriend died a virgin, but in a 2014 movie about 20-somethings he comes across like a thirsty necrophiliac. Zach’s reactions to the resurrected Beth only make sense if he’s 16 - he cannot wait to get his newly undead girlfriend out of the house and fuck her, even with a festering snake wound rotting on her inner thigh. His acting is bad but his general casting is inherently problematic DeHaan looks like he’s pushing thirty but he’s playing a young 20s guy who deals with his zombie girlfriend like he’s 16. It’s weird to watch him as he plays Zach more like a junkie than a kid in love, and to see him hit every ‘laugh line’ so hard you want to charge him with assault. Let’s start with the screen: DeHaan is actually terrible in this film, operating on a level of sweaty twitchiness that repulses. It just didn’t end up being a good movie, and it never had a chance to be, because Life After Beth stinks from script to screen. You can see how this is a good idea for a movie, how it offers lots of room for character examination, space for comedy and even little bit of heartwarming sweetness. All of that begins to become academic, though, as other dead people return and as Beth begins deteriorating physically and mentally. Zach wants to be with her, and he wants to let her know what happened to her. Her parents keep her locked away, and they don’t want to tell her the truth. But then Beth returns, out of nowhere, and without knowing that she even died. Reilly and Molly Shannon, both so wasted onscreen you hope they at least had a nice relaxing time shooting) and boyfriend, Zach, played by DeHaan. Pee-related mishap?), leaving behind her grieving family (John C. She was bitten by a snake while hiking alone (on her inner thigh, by the way. Here’s your premise: we open after the death of Beth, played by Aubrey Plaza. Life After Beth just keeps failing, each scene being tone deaf or unfunny in its own unique way but all working under a general aesthetic of being shrill, hectic and irritating. The film fails as a comedy, it fails as a relationship story and, worst of all, it really fails as a zombie film. Nothing is funny in Life After Beth, which is a major problem for a comedy. What makes him quirky is that he’s skinny and dorky and not your vision of a gun nut. In this case the brother is a gun nut who works for the local neighborhood security force where he relishes his petty power and gets excited when a zombie apocalypse allows him to finally shoot people. This character, played by Matthew Gray Gubler, is one of those excruciating indie quirky characters who seem to be sprung right from the frames of Napoleon Dynamite. Life After Beth lost me the moment it introduced Dane DeHaan’s brother.