Here After 2024 Movie Review

Topic of extreme cinematic interest: near-death experiences. The great mystery, the tunnel of light, the ethereal, almost divine heat. From this point, Robert Salerno, after several experiences as a (successful) producer, makes his directorial debut with Here After – The Beyond , adapting Sarah Conradt’s screenplay. Before delving into the actual opinion, we must open a necessary parenthesis: it is true that dubbing is not the “responsibility” of the authors, but it is still assessable in the review, as it is part of the work that the public will (or will not) go to see.

Here, the dubbing of Here After (not to be confused with Hereafter by Clint Eastwood) is not what could properly be considered a good job. Lack of synchronicity, lack of adherence, questionable adaptation , unwanted emphasis, and the Italian actors who, self-redubbing, sizzle in an often alienating result. An ineffective dubbing, in fact, discredits the value of the work in front of the public, negatively affecting the vision. If we also add that Here After , produced and born from Salerno’s desire to shoot a film in Rome, is frail from the point of view of writing, it goes without saying that the final result cannot but be irremediably cracked.

But let’s proceed in order. We were talking about strong ideas, well those of Here After , which mixes the psychological thriller with a touch of horror, up to the supernatural and the spiritual, can theoretically work. In a dark , glacial and wintry Rome, the life of Claire (Connie Britton), an American teacher at a private institute, is turned upside down when her daughter Robin (Freya Hannan-Mills) is the victim of an accident. According to the doctors, the girl is clinically dead. At least for twenty minutes. After that, she wakes up. A miracle? After all, Claire is an ardent believer. However, the girl, after the near-death experience, seems to no longer be the same. She behaves strangely, she almost no longer seems the same. She is violent, angry, aggressive. What if she was possessed by a demon?

So, what seems like an inexplicable mystery is nothing more than a question of perspective . And words. If Salerno’s direction tries to find the right balance, taking advantage of the excellent photography by Bartosz Nalazek (capable of taking the colors out of Rome, for an intelligent aesthetic idea, and adjacent to the spirit of the film), it is the story that never manages to take flight, losing the initial grip that, objectively, is interested and interesting in the main concepts. The near-death experience , in fact, in Here After – The Beyond acts as a narrative context, but is never (or never in a lucid way) made truly central with respect to the dual view that can be had of the phenomenon: scientific explanation or religious explanation? A balance that would require a certain depth, almost absent in the story signed by Sarah Conradt, who among other things had already addressed the theme of motherhood by co-writing Mothers’ Instinct .

Indeed, the other key to reading Here After is precisely the one that deals with the mother-daughter relationship . This will be the emotional inlet on which Salerno will push, net of a general indecision and a restlessness never fully expressed, and indeed lost in a canonicity that weakens the excellent starting point. Little bite and little impression, the concept of trauma to bind the events and a square pace that, unfortunately, ends up going unnoticed (and to pass too overloaded by a religious nuance that is never made kinetic, but rather made almost speculative). Too bad: the director’s desire was there, but everything else was missing.

In a gray and dark Rome, Robert Salerno investigates the concept of near-death. No answers, only questions, raised however by a sometimes vacuous script, which never manages to be truly capable of transporting us to the center of the story. A chapter in itself, the dubbing. The Italian adaptation is practically non-existent, with dubbing (or re-dubbing) out of sync that devalue the viewing experience.