'After.Life'

Clean, precise and terribly sullen

"You have to let go of the living," says the funeral director played by Liam Neeson to Anna, the dead schoolteacher in the red slip, played by Christina Ricci, in the new thriller "After.Life." He sounds like the stage manager in a particularly grim production of "Our Town." Anna, on the other hand, resembles the poor soul in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the one who's not dead yet but is being treated as such.

The film's guessing game is simple. Either the tense schoolteacher is a victim of a (fatal?) car accident, has expired and is being prepped for the afterlife, or she's alive but about to become this calmly sinister authority figure's latest prey. Clean, precise and terribly sullen, "After.Life" is like its female protagonist. It feels stuck between worlds, or genres.

Debut feature film director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, who also worked on the screenplay, asks the big philosophical questions, among them: Are the living cognizant of life as they're drifting through en route to the grave? On the other hand there's enough skin to provoke the following headline on the website bloody-disgusting.com: "A New Thriller Starring a Nude Christina Ricci!"

Ricci can be an effective actress, though with her eerie-teen years behind her, she too seems to be eternally on the cusp of whatever she's turning into. That moon-face sits rather uneasily on the starlet's body, and her voice seems to waver on its own accord. Still, she's fearless, and not quite like anyone else out there, and "After.Life" presents her with a leading role, albeit a largely decorative and passive one.

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✭ After.Life – 102 min. Rated R:
Nudity, disturbing images, language, sexuality. Sawgrass 23, 2600 NW 136th Ave., Sunrise; Paradise 24, 15601 Sheridan St., Davie; Aventura 24, 19501 Biscayne Blvd., Aventura