After Life (7.5/10)
This is a movie were a single plot line already stopped me cold and made me go totally wild in my head. I don't think any other movie has done this so far for me.
Spoiler-Free Movie Plot:
"After death, people have a week to choose only one memory to keep for eternity."
Over the course of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a gate between life and death. They are guided to choose and recreate one memory which they can take with them to their next life. So the film starts with a bunch of interviews where each of the individuals tells their story which comes with a lot of talking and the need to read many subtitles while at the same time I was more interested in my own thoughts on the subject. This really distracted me from the start of the movie and also made it harder to follow later on as I missed parts. However, this didn't take anything away from the powerful message that this movie brings over. I didn't really relate to any of the characters, I never got the Japanese vibes which I generally love, the music also wasn't anything special, but all of that was just fully forgiven by the simple plot concept of this movie.
After over an hour of mostly interviews with the 22 different people each telling their story and trying to find the memory they want, they started to recreate the memories after which each one individually could move on. To be honest, I really got distracted and missed a large part of this movie, but this didn't really keep me from fully getting the message and understanding everything. In the end, almost everyone chose small seemingly meaningless things in life as a memory to take with them and so did I while doing the though experiment which in a way really was eye opening.
I don't think this is a movie you really need to watch for the 2-hour lenght to get the most out of it. Just sitting down an thinking about the question and watching a Youtube Video about the concept of the movie for me did way more than the actual movie itself.
So while I wasn't really blown away by the movie itself, the concept of the plot ifself is just extremely strong and made this a movie that will forever stick with me. So it gets a 7.5/10 for me as a nice average!
| # | 2025 Watched Movies | Score |
|---|---|---|
| #01 | Heretic | 7.8/10 |
| #02 | A Different Man | 6.9/10 |
| #03 | Look Back | 6.9/10 |
| #04 | Caddo Lake | 7.5/10 |
| #05 | Sing Sing | 6.0/10 |
| #06 | Paris, Texas | 9.2/10 |
| #07 | The Greatest Night In Pop | 7.2/10 |
| #08 | Sometimes I Think About Dying | 7.3/10 |
| #09 | Memory Lane (De Terugreis) | 6.8/10 |
| #10 | Winter In Sokcho | 7.6/10 |
| #11 | On Falling | 6.8/10 |
| #12 | Carry-On | 6.9/10 |
| #13 | The Brutalist | 6.6/10 |
| #14 | Dune Part Two | 6.1/10 |
| #15 | Companion | 7.8/10 |
| #16 | Under The Silver Lake | 7.2/10 |
| #17 | After Life | 7.5/10 |