Watching Life After Beth feels an awful lot like watching square pegs being jammed into round holes. On paper, all of the film’s bits and pieces make sense: a dead girlfriend, her insufferably pining boyfriend, shady parents, a case of inexplicable resurrection, a subsequent spree of zombie hijinks. But few of them end up satisfyingly fitting together, no matter how hard the cast and crew try over 80 minutes. The results aren’t bad so much as pitiable. You wish that someone would do the courtesy of performing a mercy killing and putting the film out of its damn misery.
Where does a concept like this go wrong? Life After Beth has all of the components necessary for really memorable genre fare, but if you gave a layman a pile of cylinders, spark plugs, pistons, valves, crankshafts et al, they probably couldn’t cobble together a working engine. Such is the case with the debut of writer/director Jeff Baena, who takes the helm without a trace of confidence or even a sense of purpose. There are no fewer than five different narratives packed together within Life After Beth‘s framework; Baena can neither pick one on which to focus or figure out how to make them harmonize.
So the film is kind of a mess. At the very least, it’s a short mess, but that doesn’t make it any less scattershot. The basics are simple: twitchy teenager Zach (Dane DeHaan) is devastated by the death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza), taking solace in smoking pot and playing late-night chess with her dad Maury (John C. Reilly). But no sooner is Beth put in the ground than she comes back to life, brimming with love for Zach that borders on the obsessive and sans any memory of dying.
It’s a miracle until it isn’t. Even horror rookies will tell you that nine times out of ten, people returning from the grave usually doesn’t lead to good things. In Beth’s case, a trip beyond the veil turns her into a ravenous, flesh-craving zombie, though at first she’s just sweet as punch and so happy to be with Zach. The cinematic antecedents here are fairly blatant; Cemetery Man and Shaun of the Dead come to immediate mind, along with underseen gems like Dead Girl, camp classics like Return of the Living Dead 3 and Dead Alive, and absolute garbage like My Boyfriend’s Back. Life After Beth is at least better than that, but it’s worse than the rest by far.
Part of the problem lies in intent. It’s immediately obvious from all of the clutter here that Baena is an ideas guy, but he has too many of them and neither the ability to self-edit nor the skill to bring them all together. They run roughshod and half-cooked all over script and screen; you can see the movie Life After Beth could have been with judicious editing or a longer running time. Is this a film about a young man wrestling with complex feelings over a damaged relationship, given an inexplicable second chance in the wake of tragedy? Or is this just a film about that same young man trying to do right by his undead sweetheart as she slowly brings about a minor zombie apocalypse? It’s both, but it’s neither, and the film’s ADD tenor grows tiresome fast. There isn’t even a build-up point where scares and gore let us give the sloppy storytelling a pass, mostly because there’s none of either.
But the real misstep here is perspective. Life After Beth isn’t about Beth at all; it’s about the men in her life, who lock horns with one another over what’s best for her at the drop of a hat. Plaza, to her credit, makes Beth into a wonderful, even compelling, screen monster, but she’s given little to do other than out-Deadite Jane Levy. Baena plays with issues of patriarchy through subtext – just look at the header image here for proof – but the masculine posturing here overwhelms, and Beth doesn’t have the requisite agency to squeeze commentary out of the film’s gender politics. Maybe the only thing Life After Beth really needed is a change in protagonist. A feminine point of view could have made all the difference.
