THE STORY – While hiking alone in the woods, Isabel encounters the enigmatic and alluring Elliott, a mysterious musician whose sudden presence transforms a remote cave into the stage for a dangerous dance of longing, attraction, and lust. What begins as a fleeting affair soon spirals into something heart ripping, until Elliott abruptly disappears, leaving Isabel to navigate the haunting aftershocks of their vanished love. As she struggles with obsession, toxic fandom, and fractured ideals, Isabel is forced to confront her hidden desires and the shifting boundaries of her own identity.
THE CAST – Mia Maestro, Lee Pace & Rupert Friend
THE TEAM – Lucio Castro (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 96 minutes
Some 20 years before the release of “After This Death,” actress Mia Maestro was gaining more exposure in the United States thanks to a key supporting role in the TV series “Alias.” Sadly, that didn’t lead to much else of note for the Argentine actress as far as Hollywood was concerned. In fact, Lucio Castro’s sophomore feature film contains arguably her highest-profile English-language role since her two-season stint on the Guillermo del Toro-created show “The Strain.”
Maestro stars as Isabel, who is from Argentina but living in the US (much like the director himself). One day, while hiking, she has a chance encounter with a guy named Elliot, and they hit it off in their own unconventional way. She then realizes, while hanging out with her best friend Alice, he is, in fact, a somewhat big name in the indie music world, with a very devoted following due to the way his band’s albums are structured, creating a sequence of sorts that fans are encouraged to engage with and interpret. Alice is, in fact, an admirer of the band, and through her, Isabel has a second interaction with Elliot, realizing there might be something bubbling under the surface between them.
A full-blown love affair ensues, but it soon becomes clear that Isabel is much more smitten with Elliot than he is with her, and his aloof and increasingly distant behavior becomes off-putting. Then, one day, he disappears. Vanishes without a trace. She’s not quite sure how to deal with it, especially when she discovers Elliot’s artistic world – with which she had little to no involvement – is about to violently collide with her daily routine: his more ardent fans have started to believe she may be the key to the band’s oft-mentioned, hitherto unreleased final album. At this point, his whereabouts take a backseat compared to her own safety.
Maestro previously worked with Castro on his debut feature “End of the Century,” which enjoyed a decent run on the festival circuit in 2019, and their rapport is evident in the performance he gets out of her: lively, vulnerable, nuanced, it gives the film its emotional footing and stands out as its most compelling asset, showcasing the talents of an actress whose work has sometimes been woefully underseen. She’s particularly effervescent in the scenes she shares with Gwendoline Christie, who lends solid support in the role of Alice.
On the opposite end of the spectrum as Elliot is Lee Pace, who coincidentally shared the screen with Maestro a few years back in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.” The actor has a natural predisposition when it comes to playing oddballs. Still, he’s underserved in this case by a script that rarely gives him anything to dig into other than the most basic indie musician tropes. It also doesn’t help that the character falls victim to a general issue that has been known to plague these projects: the film itself doesn’t really do justice to his perceived status as an aloof genius capable of inspiring a devoted fanbase (it must be said, though, the dramatic underscore in general, credited to composers Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo, is solid enough).
This also affects his chemistry with Maestro, which is inconsistent at best and imperceptible at worst, therefore weakening the emotional stakes when Elliot disappears and the plot supposedly thickens (if anything, it gets even thinner). Rupert Friend, who plays the singer’s brother Ted, lives up to his last name and adds a modicum of intrigue, but even his competent work can’t elevate a premise which, at that point, has lost most of its momentum and has to rely chiefly on Maestro’s performance.
To her credit, she remains an interesting presence throughout. One wishes it had been in the context of something other than this bizarre, languid character study that lacks character and tries to be a mood piece without figuring out the mood it’s aiming for (even with the assistance of the aforementioned score). Ironically, just as Isabel finds herself pondering what to do next, so does the movie itself, except it can’t quite figure out where it wants to go, landing in an awkward limbo-like state where answers arrive but don’t really add up to much. Incidents pile up as the story progresses, but they do little to propel things forward (the 96-minute runtime feels much longer once Elliot is out of the picture).
There are kernels of good ideas, but they never grow into anything significant, leaving Maestro with the thankless task of delivering a nuanced, compelling performance at odds with the drab, almost lethargic mood and cliché-ridden writing of the overall picture. It’s almost like a song that starts promisingly and then gets lost in its own self-importance, relinquishing whatever hook it had vis-à-vis the listener and squandering its potential. In that sense, it’s Castro’s equivalent of the difficult second album. Perhaps the third will deliver on the promise of his debut.
