Movies about the music industry can be a tough pitch. Selling a superstar artist as just that demands either the savviest ear for commercially viable hits and the savviest eye for popular iconography, or a considerable suspension of disbelief from the audience. Even the more successful titles in this field tend to rest on the latter to some extent — 2018’s A Star Is Born had the hits, but the dime-store wigs on lead Lady Gaga and the conspicuously modest Grammys recreation, amongst other elements, fell short of total believability. We viewers know what big-time music acts look and sound like, and one suspects so too do most filmmakers. They just tend to have a hard time replicating that in their works.
Lucio Castro’s After This Death finds a smart workaround to this problem, even if it can’t help but succumb to it anyway. Isabel (Mía Maestro) is a married expectant mother whose music journalist best friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie) tags her along to a gig for underground experimental band Likeliness Increases. Backstage after the show, Isabel chats with frontman Elliott (Lee Pace), whom she’d previously met while hiking in the forest. She’s drawn to his brooding, mysterious charisma, just as he’s drawn to her cool intelligence and sexual directness, and an affair commences, heady and dangerous due to Isabel’s marriage to Ted (Rupert Friend), the pair’s gently bristling, clashing personalities, and the strange, sometimes threatening behavior of his band’s obsessive fans.
Likeliness Increases make pretty bad, dour music, but it’s the sort of bad, dour music that one probably would encounter in a small underground venue in the rural U.S. That the band remains a strictly cult entity thus feels appropriate, though Castro has a more sinister kind of cult in mind for the band, as Isabel finds out the further she’s unwittingly pulled into Elliott’s orbit. If he’s an intense figure, his fans are doubly so, possessing a kind of obsession that feels extreme for followers of such a decidedly low-level outfit. It’s thus that After This Death’s plausibility comes into serious question — one begins to regard the shifts in narrative direction less as purposeful deviations in and of themselves, and more as belabored excuses to wrench a psychological thriller out of material that can’t naturally support one. Castro seems to be aiming for something Jonathan Glazer-esque here, but he’s too compassionate and pensive a filmmaker, and the material here offering too shallow a plot, to pull it off.
That pensiveness, too, comes across far more deliberately than it did in Castro’s debut, End of the Century, which was characterized by a yearning wistfulness. That’s been replaced here by empty inscrutability, whether in Elliott’s distant pomposity — a projected quality, rendering him equally difficult to like and difficult to buy as a successful musician of any calibre — or in Isabel’s curious mix of timidity and irrationality. Maestro’s muted performance navigates the ostensible contradictions and occasional emotional outbursts of her character with grace, but she’s as hamstrung by these challenges as she is evidently inspired by them. Like the similarly committed Pace, she struggles to convey much of substance about a character Castro simply doesn’t want the viewer to know nor understand in much depth. Only Ted (Friend) resonates with much clarity and accessibility — representing perhaps the film’s simplest element, but also its most relatable for his simplicity.
What Castro may intend as complexity reads largely as stilted, studied distance, making his gradual shift into thriller territory feel manipulative and inorganic, just as his portrait of a would-be charismatic semi-messianic rock star feels inauthentic — the songs, by composers Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo, are less poetic than pretentious, and Pace’s performances of them are too internalized to truly convince. And yet, After This Death nonetheless captures one’s attention, if only in inspiring hope that the film might coalesce its many odd, disparate compulsions into a surprising whole. It doesn’t, but many of those compulsions are intriguing nevertheless. Castro is experimenting here, and the results are curious enough to justify his experimentation, even if they’re not entirely good enough to give After This Death the stamp of approval.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 1.
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