Hereafter (Blu-ray)

had read so many tepid reviews for this film that I wasn't sure what I was going to see when I picked it up recently. But I found an incredibly involving, thoughtful and (as noted below) mature piece of film-making.

Although it's tagged as a supernatural genre film (which very loosely it is) it's not about ghosts and jumps and scares. I can only think that at the time some people had different expectations because of the use of the term supernatural going in that what the film wants to be about. It's actually a very involving personal drama about people searching for some semblance of meaning and understanding after experiencing death in different ways by having three separate stories which then (admittedly in a slightly convenient way) converge at the end.

There's lots of different things to believe in the question of whether there is an afterlife or not, and the film doesn't (it couldn't) offer up a definitive answer one way or the other because that isn't the point. It's about what people believe themselves and how that affects them and those around them, how some exploit that, how we see life and how we move on when these things happen. That doesn't lend itself to flash, and horrifyingly realistic CGI scenes of a Tsunami disaster at the start of the film notwithstanding, it's a very low-key film in fact.

It's a subtle, well acted, involving and grown up film.