This month’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones continues the cinematic tradition of contemplating what comes next, after one has shuffled off this mortal coil. As far as artistic challenges go, depicting the afterlife with any degree of success is undeniably formidable. Yet it is a challenge that has inspired countless gifted and foolhardy filmmakers to attempt the definitive version of life on the other side.
The landscape of the afterlife on display in The Lovely Bones, wandered by the soul of Suzy Salmon, a young girl murdered and forced from afar to watch her family come to terms with their wrenching bereavement, is one of the more elaborate to be created onscreen. The way in which it fluctuates to symbolically reflect her mood, bursting into verdant life one moment and becoming a ravaged wasteland the next, is reminiscent of What Dreams May Come, an almost forgotten fantasy-drama from 1998 starring Robin Williams.
Effectively a pop-culture retelling of Dante’s Inferno, relating the story of a man who decides to travel from Heaven to Hell to rescue his wife, damned for committing suicide, the film is heavy-handed and overwrought, yet endearing for its remarkable visual sensibility: the realms of the saved and the condemned Williams traverses have a painterly feel, lit with a golden haze, and melting into one another like Renaissance masterpieces in an overheated art gallery.
In terms of computer-generated otherworldly vistas, the Hell of Constantine is also worth remarking upon; smartly opting to update traditional imagery of the fire-and-brimstone underworld, the art team built a Hell modelled after the modern urban environment, only one that appears to be caught in a perpetual nuclear blast.
No film has more poignantly shown the audience a literal Heaven, meanwhile, than Powell and Pressburger’s sublime British classic, A Matter of Life and Death. Ingeniously, the team behind it decided to shoot the scenes on Earth in vibrant Technicolour and those in Heaven, including the final set-piece at the Celestial Court, in shimmering monochrome, where it might have seemed more obvious to do the reverse. As it is, the black and white photography evokes a Heaven that is both timeless and distant from our reality, momentous and yet diminished by the Arcadian splendour of the WW2-era England in which the film is largely set.
Nonetheless, the overwhelmingly literal spin on the afterlife that these films adopt causes dramatic problems in that despite being spectacular they also risk losing sight of the human anxieties that define them. Most importantly our fear of death, and the desire to believe in something else beyond it. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is for this reason the film to deal most unforgettably with the question of an afterlife. Concerning a knight of the crusades, tormented by doubts over the existence of God in a time of plague and religious hysteria, it draws upon the tradition of medieval artwork to portray a universe in which Death, personified and with a penchant for deciding mortals’ fates over games of chess, stands between us and any glimpse of a comforting afterlife.
Whilst we can rest assured that the future will bring further colourful and eclectic versions of the afterlife to our cinemas, it is unlikely that any will approach the power of Bergman’s, made all the more present to our minds by its disturbing and agonising invisibility.
