Critic Reviews

If you’re looking for proof of an afterlife, you will be disappointed, but as the medical experts stress in the film, there is at least evidence of one. You can be rigid in your beliefs throughout the entire film, or you can have an open mind. Either way, what happens after After Death is you will have been entertained.

A fairly limp documentary.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

Whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.

A repetitive slog that’s only shape or narrative momentum comes from its slow unmasking as religious propaganda.

America has long had its wildest forms of fantasy and comfort fueled by promises about things that are not of this world. Stuff we can’t confirm until we die. An afterlife, the pearly gates. After Death follows this tradition, with a cadre of talking heads who had incredibly traumatic physical instances that are bundled here as Near-Death Experiences that prove the existence of God and Heaven.