I had been searching for a film to watch then. I had not been asking for much; I had just wanted a contemplative Japanese film. So I ran a search for Japanese films on the Criterion Collection’s database — which turned up more film options than I cared to sort through.

I revised my search then. I searched for films made by Hirokazu Kore-eda, because it had been his work — particularly Still Walking — that had led me to love Japanese films in the first place. I had loved the gentle motion with which his stories moved. When the results came up, there were only two films —and one of them was Still Walking. The other was After Life.

In his essay “After Life: In Memoriam,” writer Viet Thanh Nguyen considers how After Life delightfully defies Hollywood film conventions in being “understated in tone and design.” As Nguyen goes on to explain: “The Hollywood version would probably involve a soaring orchestral score, exaggerated emotions, and an explanation of the mechanics of the premise” — not to mention a speed that rushes from plot point to plot point.¹ But After Life denies us all this. It leaves questions unanswered, slows down, comes to rest. It is content with what is quiet.

At the beginning of the film, we find ourselves at a run-down facility. Its staff are informed that they will handle twenty-two people this week. Soon, we have a shot of the facility’s entrance: a curtain of fog, through which people emerge, check in with a receptionist, then wait in a lobby where they merrily chat with others. A young staff member appears to announce the conference rooms to which each person is assigned.

A knock at the door of a conference room. “Yes, please come in,” says a staff member, and the door opens to reveal a charming old woman. She hangs up her hat and coat on a rack next to the door, then bows and takes a seat at the table in the middle of the room. Sunlight gently illuminates her smiling face.

After confirming the woman’s name, birthdate, and age, the staff member in front of her falls silent. “I think you understand the situation,” he finally says, “but I need to inform you officially. Kimiko Tatara…” Another pause. “You died yesterday.”²

The camera flicks through the faces of the twenty-two dead as they calmly receive the news. A wide span of ages are present (from a young schoolgirl to an elderly woman) as are personalities (from a rebellious, wild-haired young man to a prim businessman). There is a prostitute, and a man who indulges in prostitutes; a pilot, a World War II Veteran.

They are told that, over the next three days, they must choose their happiest memory from their past life. After they have chosen, the staff will recreate that memory on film using actors, props, a set. The dead will take nothing but that film with them into eternity.

We begin to sense that the facility is too arbitrary. Why just three days? we might ask. Why only past memories? Why only one memory? Kore-eda offers no answers, only emphasizing the facility’s arbitrariness: at the end of the film, the rules are bent and a memory made after death, experienced in the facility’s walls, is chosen.

But if we speak of how the facility arbitrarily sets rules, we should also speak of how the dead arbitrarily, individually choose their memories when the staff could do so for them. (They have the lives of the dead recorded on tape.) Eternity becomes centered around the individual’s judgment, which departs from the Christian view that God decides our eternities.

After Life departs even further from the Christian view in its implicit theological framework. “So everyone ends up here?” the rebellious young man exclaims. “Everyone? You mean, whether they were good or bad or whatever, all that stuff about going to hell if you’re bad — not true?”³ To which a staff member says yes.

But there are still a couple points of alignment between After Life and Christianity. If we consider the rule that only a memory from one’s past life can be chosen, this is similar to the Christian belief that we are eternally judged based on our earthly conduct — and nothing else.⁴ In turn, we have the implicit rule in After Life that the quality of one’s life determines the quality of one’s eternity — even if it is not laid out in terms of Heaven and Hell.

Take the prim businessman at the beginning of the film. When asked to reflect on his life in search of a memory, he interrupts: “I really don’t want to think about all the things I’ve done. I have only bad memories.”⁵

He looks away from the staff member assigned to him as he says this, gazing absently, resignedly at the table.

If we discuss Heaven and Hell we should, of course, discuss Purgatory. The Catholic conception is that Purgatory is the state in which — though one is definitively assigned to Heaven — one must be purified first of one’s sinful desires.⁶ It is an inherently temporary state. Now, Purgatory is comparable to the facility in After Life in its temporariness. Somewhat.

The facility is temporary to those who choose to choose a memory. The option to not choose a memory (which almost no one considers, and which is equal in effect to being unable to choose a memory) makes one a staff member, eternally interviewing the dead. Yet this is not a true eternity; should a staff member choose to do so, long after the three-day deadline, they could still ask to leave the facility to spend eternity with their finest memory. Purgatory is inherently temporary; the facility is potentially temporary.

When the three-day deadline has passed and the staff are ready to begin shooting film, two of the dead have not chosen a memory. The rebellious young man has chosen not to choose; an old man in his seventies is unable to choose. The old man slumps against a bench as the young man circles him restlessly.

As the old man does his best to ignore him, the young man chuckles about how the dead have taken pains to look good for the shoot — combing hair, putting on makeup. At the same time, however, he criticizes it. “As you get older,” he says, “your looks start to fade. They’re trying to compensate for the confidence they don’t have.”

He thwacks a bamboo branch around.

“They’re working so hard to fake it. Which is why the younger generation, like me, makes fun of them.”⁷

The old man smiles slightly.

Recreating memories for film in After Life makes use of rather crude methods. Clouds are simulated by a painted set and tufts of cotton; the rocking of a tram, by staff shaking a tram model back and forth; falling cherry blossom petals, by silk petals falling out from overhead baskets. Film is just faking it, Kore-eda seems to say.

But is it just filming that is faking? Perhaps not. Life, too, seems to consist in faking — something Kore-eda suggests in other scenes. The prostitute admits to lying about her age by four years when prodded by a staff member. A staff member, losing to another at a game of shōgi, pretends to go to the bathroom and conveniently knocks over the shōgi pieces. At night, two staff members gaze upwards, captivated by the shining moon. Which is later revealed to be an illusion: it is just light shining through lenses that simulate the moon in its phases.

Even the vision of eternity that Kore-eda presents consists of a kind of pretending. As one of the dead realizes, spending eternity with a happy memory also means that all other memories are forgotten; that one is only aware of happiness. Which departs again from the Christian perspective. Yes, Heaven consists in joy beyond comprehension, but Christ’s heavenly body still bears the wounds of His Passion.

Pretending and arbitrariness come together in Kore-eda’s eternity as they do in the Venetian Carnival, where Venetians indulge before Lent by partying in masks that delight them. The dead in Kore-eda’s eternity could be said to don masks of their own making that are frozen in one memory’s smile. This prospect is attractive for some of the dead, and for good reason — the same reason, I think, that makes the Venetian Carnival so attractive. As Nantas Salvalaggio puts it, one of the great attractions of Carnival consists in how it grants one to escape the limitations, the predicaments of one’s identity. In how one can be whomever one desires to be.⁸

One elderly woman in After Life barely speaks (if at all) in the film. She scarcely complies with the staff who interview her. She is lost in her own head. Staff members later inform us that she has already been living in her memories since she was nine. At the same time, however, she is not completely detached from reality; instead, she sees reality through the lens of her childhood memories. So we see her wandering on the grounds of the facility, collecting acorns and leaves that please her.

For this old woman, reality is present, just incomplete — like a moon in its crescent phase. This may be what Kore-eda hints towards when the facility’s manager remarks: “The moon is fascinating, isn’t it? Its shape never changes, yet it looks different depending on the angle of the light.”⁹ And yet Kore-eda positively portrays this old woman. He makes her incompleteness beautiful: in one scene, she looks away from a staff member towards the window — entranced by the song of a bird.

This old woman seems to anticipate what it looks like to experience Kore-eda’s eternity. She is living in incomplete memories as the dead will. So the question becomes: for the dead, could an incomplete memory also serve as a lens? Could a sliver, a shard of a lens work in a beautiful way?

I think so. Even if the dead spend eternity with an incomplete memory, it is nevertheless their finest, brightest memory. That sliver of a lens that such a memory offers would lead the dead to contemplate reality’s goodness. And perhaps that is what is beautiful: seeing reality’s goodness when, in the past, one’s eyes could only see the miserable, the humdrum.

I think this concept of incomplete beauty offers an insight into the nature of film. Films are inherently incomplete; making them involves cutting and splicing glimpse after glimpse after glimpse. Yet by this cutting and splicing life is experienced sharper, deeper. Moments that are ordinarily passed over are magnified to make us think again.

This principle, I posit, is central to After Life. The dead speak of the finest moments of their past lives in glimpses: waiting for a lover at a bridge, being bathed in sunlight, soaring between the clouds in a plane. They speak of dancing as a child, of eating rice balls in a bamboo grove. But these memories took place, most of them, on ordinary days; if we had experienced them ourselves, we might have passed over them without a glance, consumed by whatever headache or lack of sleep or looming deadline we had. Yet when the dead cut and splice to such fine moments, we are forced to think again. We come to realize just how wonderful ordinary life can be.

N o t e s

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “After Life: In Memoriam,” The Criterion Collection, August 10, 2021, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7492-after-life-in-memoriam.

2. After Life, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (1998; The Criterion Collection, 2021), https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR3WKXVY/, 00:04:36.

3*. After Life*, Kore-eda, 00:08:37.

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2019), 1021-1022.

5*. After Life*, Kore-eda, 00:06:35.

6*. Catechism of the Catholic Church*, 1030, 1472.

7. After Life, Kore-eda, 01:14:19.

8. Nantas Salvalaggio, “Nostalgia of Lost Carnivals,” in The Carnival of Venice, ed. Gigi Bevilacqua (Milan: Amilcare Pizzi Editore, 1984), 30.

9*. After Life*, Kore-eda, 01:11:34.