After Life

This is a deeply humanist film. There is no talking about money, no wondering of being dead, there is a serene acceptance of the cycle of life. All the dead people arriving in the building must choose a memory to be worn forever, and everyone tries to remember a symbol, a tangible "proof" of having lived. It's a Divine Comedy of 1998 but for the dead (for Dante it was a passage to be done in life). Not even hell is contemplated: everyone will go to heaven. Kore-eda uses real actors, but also common people to make this narration as genuine as possible. The calm, somewhat surreal landscape of the structure is an ideal backdrop for this sort of limbo. The movie itself loses its meaning after a few minutes, once unveiled the plot, as soon as the viewer understands that it is him itself called to make the choice he is seeing in the film: obviously death will not be so, but this is a workout for the last moments of life, which will be exactly like that. Bad news is that we will never know when this will happen. 8/10