Hereafter

Building upon his recent achievements—including the award-winning Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino—Clint Eastwood’s new supernatural drama Hereafter ventures into the unknown with moderate success.

The film explores mortality through three converging storylines. Matt Damon stars as George, a San Francisco factory worker who comes to terms with his psychic ability to communicate with the dead; Marie (Cecile De France), a French news anchor, copes with a near-death experience when her island vacation is terminated by a catastrophic tsunami; and Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), a British school boy, struggles to accept the loss of his twin brother. With a screenplay by Peter Morgan, best-known for historical dramas like The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, the film provides a fresh take on often eerie subject matter—resulting in a movie that resembles a thoughtfully crafted character drama more than science fiction.

And yet, Hereafter stumbles more than once. The film lags at times, and though the opening flood scene exhibits exceptional special effects, it is severely disconnected from the rest of the narrative. Hereafter also tries so hard to remain inoffensive that it almost completely skirts religion’s role in our relationship with the afterlife, leaving an elephant in the room that hovers over the viewers’ heads until they leave the theater. On the upside, Matt Damon delivers a brilliantly understated performance. George’s detachment from his psychic readings makes them believable, and his consistent virtue makes his failed attempts to live a normal life all the more poignant. Throw in a simple but effective musical score—composed by Eastwood himself—into the mix, and the film bears more resemblance to a classic Eastwood movie than initially meets the eye.

Despite its faults, Hereafter is worth seeing. For a guy who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year, Eastwood still has some pretty good tricks up his sleeve.