Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!
I went into Life After Beth with a couple of clear reservations. The first is that I’ve never been entirely sold on Aubrey Plaza. I know I’m supposed to like her; she’s been marketed as someone who is emotionally detached in a cool way, sort of the live-action version of Daria. The second issue is Dane DeHaan, an actor who has one of the most slapable faces I have seen. DeHaan reeks of smugness to me. That might be unfair, but it’s also true that the first couple of movies I saw him in, I disliked, so my dislike of him is at least there for a reason.
And yet, Life After Beth beckoned. It’s a zombie movie, one of my favorite subgenres, especially considering how much has been done with it over the years (I see you shaking your head; we’ll get there). It’s also clearly a romance that is going to end badly, something else I tend to appreciate. Finally, it’s a movie that clearly wants to have fun with the premise. This is a horror movie with a cast of comic actors. So, while the two stars are actors I don’t tend to like as much as I’m supposed to, there was a lot here that drew me in.
Beth Slocum (Plaza) goes for a hike on her own and is bitten by a venomous snake, which kills her. Naturally, her parents Maury (John C. Reilly) and Geenie (Molly Shannon) do their best to get through the funeral, along with Beth’s boyfriend Zach Orfman (DeHaan). Zach’s family, Noah (Paul Reiser), Judy (Cheryl Hines) and brother Kyle (Matthew Gray Gubler) are not very supportive of Zach’s loss, and he grows closer to Beth’s parents, especially Maury.
So it comes as a shock when Beth shows back up. No one believes him, of course, and Beth’s parents have started acting very strangely. Specifically, they don’t want Beth to go out of the house during the day and won’t talk to her about the fact that she died because she has no memory of what happened to her. Zach takes her out to the park in the day and she returns with blisters on her face, which demonstrates why she needs to be in during the day.
So, while Zach continues to see Beth, things start to devolve pretty quickly. Beth starts to become more and more violent and experiences wild mood swings. While Zach attempts to deal with the fact that Beth is clearly degenerating (although she hasn’t attempted to eat him or anyone else), it also suddenly becomes evident that Beth is not the only person returning from the dead. New…late…arrivals include their former postal worker, Zach’s dead grandfather, and the previous owners of the family house.
Life After Beth does a number of things that are very different from the typical zombie film, and these are very much to its benefit. The zombies here are not mindless flesh eaters. They are intelligent and while initially confused and forgetful and have a strange love of attics, they are otherwise normal-ish. Beth’s progression into manic mood swings and violence happens to all of the returned dead, and eventually they start to want to eat the people around them, but this is not instantaneous. This opens up a lot of comic possibilities—people are conversing with their dead relatives about why they want to go to the attic, not about why they want to eat them or how they have returned from the great beyond.
What Life After Beth does well is ride that line between comedy and drama almost perfectly. For the people in the film, this is horror and life-or-death drama. For those of us in the audience, it’s pure comedy and farce. The zombies are calmed by smooth jazz. Why? Because for the people in the film, it allows for a frustrating respite (everyone in the film hates smooth jazz) that adds to the surreality of their experience, and for the audience, it’s ridiculous.
It’s also pretty tame by horror movie standards. We’re not going to see bites taken out of people. The R-rating appears to be mostly for language and brief nudity. There’s blood spatter and some physical degradation, but that’s about it. People who “don’t like horror movies” might actually like this one.
It’s also got a solid cast. In addition to the people mentioned, Anna Kendrick shows up as someone potentially interested in Zach and a cause for one of Beth’s manic episodes and Garry Marshall appears as Zach’s dead grandfather.
Life After Beth isn’t going to rewrite the subgenre, but it does something that has become harder and harder to do—it takes the subgenre somewhere it doesn’t often go, and includes enough changes that it feels new but still feels like something we know. It’s just smart enough to know how ridiculous it is, and just smart enough to not make the winks to the audience too obvious.
Why to watch Life After Beth: It does a lot different with the zombie subgenre.
Why not to watch: Dane DeHaan, maybe.
