AFTER LIFE

OUT 17 AUGUST / CERT PG / 119 MINS

Best known for his down-to-earth, observational family dramas, celebrated Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life seems like an anomaly. Still filmed with all the care and gentle anguish of his later works, it’s a deeply philosophical film interested in larger and more existential questions than the societal problems he usually observes. By imagining a purgatory that functions like a human bureaucracy, in that it’s actually run by humans who have passed on, Kore-eda creates a sort of humanist spirituality, less interested in higher power than it is in the smaller, simple acts of human ritual and compassion. It’s all in service of answering a simple, but terrifying question — if you could live one single memory forever, which would you choose? There’s no perfect answer, of course, and seeing them all is part of After Life’s mesmerising, melancholic magic.