Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life: memory and the transition to eternity

¶ … Life (1998)

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 film After Life, (or Wandafuru Raifu for "Wonderful Life" in Japanese), explores the transition between life on earth and the afterlife in a way that allows him to do so without ever actually defining the nature of the afterlife at all. The film focuses on a transitory facility where newly departed individuals arrive after their deaths on their way to wherever they are destined for eternity after life. The main purpose of this layover is for them to consider their lives and to select what they consider to be their single most important memory from their lives that they wish to take with them to the afterlife. During their stay, the temporary residents receive assistance from the staff in selecting their favorite memory which is then reproduced in a film version for them. Once residents have the opportunity to view their favorite memory in this format, they instantly vanish, presumably into the afterlife, although the film provides no further indication of their fate in that regard.

Plot Summary

The film opens without any hint that the characters are actually deceased. Instead, the opening scene seems like an ordinary workday in some sort of administrative office environment. A manager briefs his staff about how many incoming clients to expect and the scene shifts to an intake procedure during which the staff of the facility process the new clients and caseworkers are assigned to assist individual clients. The audience only discovers incidentally that all of the characters are actually deceased through an "interview" of some of the characters by other characters cast as part of the film crew as though the film were a documentary.

The two most significant plot elements seem to be (1) the different responses of various individuals to the realization that they are dead and that they have been tasked with the responsibility of identifying a single most important memory from their lives, and (2) the coincidental encounter between a new client and one of the staff members who were linked in their earthly lives. More specifically, one new resident is a rebellious young man who objects to having to pick a single memory; meanwhile, another resident is an elderly man who cannot decide what memory to pick from the 72 years of his life. All of the employees are also deceased individuals; they remain employed at the facility because they were unable or unready to move on to eternity. This element gives rise to the drama that unfolds when one of the caseworkers realizes that one of the new residents was married to his former fiance prior to his own death as a very young man.

Personal Reaction

One of the most natural personal reactions to the film might be to apply the theme of the film to one's own life, such as by imagining what specific memory one would choose in the same situation as that which the characters find themselves. That may very well be the reason that the director avoided any suggestion of what might happen after the actual transition to the afterlife. By focusing on the significance of life memories, the director reminds his audience to appreciate their lives while they have that chance.