‘After This Death’ review: Niche US-set mystery is an 'arch, implausible affair'

Dir/scr: Lucio Castro. US 2025. 96 mins

In a film riddled with outrageous coincidences, it may not be a good idea to have characters comment on how outrageous those coincidences are – or idly drop mentions of their favourite Hitchcock films. In After This Death, this may be designed to warn the viewer not to take its narrative too much at face value, and to notify us that the project is essentially arthouse rather than genre mainstream. Even so, this glossy but inert US-set mystery from Argentinian writer-director Lucio Castro doesn’t intrigue nearly as much as intended, despite a coolly intense performance from lead Mia Maestro and dashes of on-off chemistry between her and co-star Lee Pace.

 Glossy but inert

While there’s not a great deal of sex here, other than a discreet lick of toe-sucking, the film – Castro’s follow-up to his 2019 debut End Of The Century – has the odd feel of a somewhat unstitched 80s/90s erotic thriller gussied up with enigmatic solemnity. It bows as a Berinale Special Gala, and is likely to appeal mostly on a very niche level to fans of art/genre hybrids.

Maestro (who intermittently narrates in Spanish voice-over) plays Isabel, an Argentinian woman living in the US where she works as a voice artist. Walking in the woods where she lives in a brutalist chateau-like mansion with husband Ted (Rupert Friend), she visits a cave and has a borderline-flirtatious encounter with a passerby named Elliott (Pace). Later, at a music gig with a writer friend (Gwendoline Christie), she meets Elliott again: he’s the singer in Likeliness Increases, an electronic rock trio whose fans have an obsessive regard for his music, and for him. That night, Isabel – despite being both married and pregnant – begins an affair with Elliott. 

Before too long, however, Elliott suddenly vanishes – as does all trace of the avidly awaited eleventh album that he is supposedly recording with his reticent brother Ronnie (Philip Ettinger). As Isabel’s life takes a dark turn, troubling things start to happen around her; even, in an utterly loopy scene whose ironic comedy doesn’t quite find its register, the arrival of a voice message personally delivered by a dancing Pierrot-style performer. By the time the film turns into a sort of deconstructed woman-in-peril thriller, Likeliness Increases that the viewer will have given up on this arch, impassive affair, in which the enveloping woods – scene of much of the action – have accumulated rather more symbolic weight than they can carry.

On the plus side, Maestro and Pace do click convincingly, the latter’s moody, wry manner and knowing delivery evoking hints of a rougher, gruffer (and considerably hairier) John Malkovich. DoP Barton Cortright lays on some ominous, sleek atmospherics throughout, and the music is from Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo – the latter doubling as costume designer. To the duo’s credit, the band numbers are more realistically convincing than we usually hear in movies about indie-style music acts, even if it defies belief that Elliott and Ronnie could have sustained a full 10 albums’ worth of this dour electro-goth material.