Life After Beth movie review & film summary (2014)

Baena effectively conveys the fog from which Zach cannot extricate himself, and the disconnect from society that envelops and comforts him. Zach’s own parents (Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines, in barely-there roles) are helpless and clueless; then again, they hardly even try. And his militant security-guard brother (Matthew Gray Gubler) stridently urges him to snap out of it.

But then, on one of his many visits to Beth’s house, Zach thinks he sees fleeting glimpses of her through the windows. And he’s right—because she isn’t really dead. She might have been at one point, but now she’s something else entirely. She looks like Beth and sounds like Beth (for a while, at least) but now she listens to smooth jazz, worries about some vague test she needs to study for and spends way too much time up in the attic. These intriguing personality quirks initially form a central mystery but end up going nowhere.

Because as it turns out—and this isn’t a spoiler, folks—Beth is a straight-up zombie, but she doesn’t know she died in the first place, and her parents don’t want to upset the family’s renewed happiness by telling her. This sets up a few instances of amusing, hectic comedy, but it’s one of many ideas in the movie that don’t feel fully fleshed out, if you’ll pardon the inadvertent pun.

Baena poses a potentially mawkish question—what would you do if you had a second chance at love—in an offbeat, unsentimental way. And that’s the most interesting element of “Life After Beth”: the way it causes us to wonder what state Beth’s in, exactly, whether she’ll be discovered and how far Zach will go to rekindle their romance.

In time, “Life After Beth” morphs from a dark comedy with some glimmers of horror to a straight-up horror film with some glimmers of humor. It’s a tough transition to make. Edgar Wright’s brilliant “Shaun of the Dead,” to which “Life After Beth” surely will draw comparisons, set the standard for this sort of tonal shift. Beth’s zombiedom, however, leads to an inexplicable uprising of the undead, which ends just as quickly for whatever reason. Did she open some sort of portal? Does everyone think they’re in the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video? Similarly, Baena seems to have glossed over the interior logic when it comes to Beth herself. Sometimes she’s predatory; sometimes she’s romantic. The tension should be building, but instead it just sort of shuffles along.

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