Hereafter Review Roundup

by Jordan Yerman | October 22, 2010 at 09:09 am

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Hereafter Reviews are Mixed

Hereafter, starring Matt Damon and directed by Clint Eastwood, gets its general release on October 22, and reviews are in. Critics disagreed wildly over Hereafter: while few outright hated it, a prevailing opinion was that the movie fails to capture the unfilmable.

Hereafter follows three people as they wrestle with death: a French news anchor aught in the 2005 tsunami, a retired San Francisco psychic and a young London boy grieving for his dead twin.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle loved Hereafter, comparing it favorably to Babel and Crossing Over due to its specific approach and egalitarian treatment of its characters:

All three movies are responses to the interconnectedness of the world, but "Hereafter" is by far the most successful, partly because it has the best screenplay - by Peter Morgan ("The Queen") - and partly because it has a director who understands the difference between important and self-important.

WHile the AV Club went with "relentlessly dour", Dana Stevens at Slate doesn't think that the film's multiplot structure does it any favors as it tries to show the unshowable:

And, at long last, more than an hour into this stuff, the three stories begin to weave together—but the braid they form is maddeningly loose. The feeling of the last act is one of dispersal and fragmentation, the plot's energy slackening just when it should build.

The Village Voice gives Hereafter a thumbs-down, as it were:

Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it’s a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.