“Life After Beth” had me confused, and it was partly my fault. I had done a modest amount of research on the film before I watched it—Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, Aubrey Plaza as the titular character—and anticipated seeing all the elements of a classic zom-com—slapstick humor, dumb apocalyptic flesh eating, shallow storyline.
And while all of this was certainly in there, “Life After Beth” shook up my perception of the zom-com genre just enough to make me question whether what I had seen was a zom-com, a horror movie, a relationship drama, an action flick, or just something else. Hint: it’s all of the above.
Dane DeHaan portrays Zach, whose girlfriend Beth Slocum (Plaza) dies from a snake bite while hiking alone in the mountains. He mourns her death with Beth’s father Maury (John C. Reilly) over a joint and expresses his regrets of not having said certain things to her when he still had the chance. Both Maury and Beth’s mother (Molly Shannon) console him, and treat him as if he were family. One day, however, the Slocums cut off all communication with Zach, ignoring his phone calls, and pretending that no one is home when he rings their doorbell. Smelling something fishy, he begins actively snooping around the Slocum household, only to one day peer through the windows to see his supposedly-dead girlfriend Beth roaming around the hallways, alive and well.When confronting them with his discovery, the Slocums do everything they can to hide Beth’s re-existence, but when Beth’s mother fails to hide her daughter in time, they are forced to admit (not in front of Beth, of course) that their daughter somehow has returned from the dead.
The success of a zom-com plotline usually requires the characters to maintain a certain caliber of stupidity, and this is where “Life After Beth” takes it to the extreme. Upon learning that Beth is now alive again, Zach quickly chooses to ignore all his inquiries regarding Beth’s mysterious return to life and helplessly falls for her love again. Sure, she’s acting a little weird, part of her memory seems to be wiped, but who cares, right? She’s back and that’s awesome! While there were many opportunities for it, no one, not the Slocums, not Zach, give the whole scenario a second thought. No one stops to say: “Hey, isn’t it a little bizarre that she died but now she’s here again?” No one except Zach questions the hole in Beth’s gravesite, but of course, he’s busy having sex with a zombie to really care. The characters all simply skate over it, and carry on with life as if nothing ever happened. Why they all pretend like nothing ever happened, as with a lot of things in this movie, is never explained.
But of course, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Soon enough, on a secret midnight date on the beach where Zach has planned his own acoustic concert for his lovely Beth, she starts becoming violent and terrifyingly strong before setting an entire structure on fire. She starts consuming Zach’s car seat, becomes agitated by sunlight, and can only be soothed by the sound of the droning sounds of smooth elevator jazz. Before he knows it, his dead grandparents reappear from the grave, and suddenly, the quietness of their calm suburban life becomes obliterated by a slew of dead people who are now not-so-dead. The moment Zach realizes that he has lost his Beth takes place in the form of a bloody Aubrey Plaza feeding on Molly Shannon’s finger tendons. It’s a full-on zombie apocalypse. It was a gradual climb for sure to get to this point, and while I did feel the film was too slow for the majority of its running time, I was surprised at how satisfied I was by the time the film reached its climactic moment that concluded the movie very sensibly.
While it was very bothersome that many elements of the film that were established were left untied or unexplained (Beth’s housekeeper, for instance), I give this movie credit for not being in it purely for the apocalyptic gags to squeeze laughs out of us through pure slapstick. Instead, despite its flaws, it told a very levelheaded (using this word loosely) story of love, loss, and zombies that makes the film worthy of checking out.
The A24 film was exclusively released on DirectTV on July 17, 2014 and will have a limited theatrical release on August 15, 2014.
