Life After Beth (2014)

Life After Beth arrived at Sundance in 2014 as a modest zombie romantic comedy from a first-time director, Jeff Baena, working from a spec script that had sat dormant for a decade. The premise is tidy: a young man loses his girlfriend to a snakebite, she returns from the grave, and the relationship resumes with rot setting in. Aubrey Plaza plays the title corpse. Dane DeHaan plays the mourner. Around them sits a deep bench of comic professionals, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Cheryl Hines, Paul Reiser, Anna Kendrick, all of them white, none of them present to make a statement about anything.

Baena has said the film concerns a bad relationship and the curse of reconciliation. The camera stays at Zach's eye level throughout, which leaves Beth rendered as an object of his grief and his wish fulfillment. That is a deliberate formal choice, and it means the film has almost no interest in her interior life. There is no argument here about gender, no thesis about race, no environmental lament, no critique of wealth. The zombies are a metaphor for a breakup, and that is the whole of the metaphor's labor.

The picture is slight, shot in twenty-two days for a couple of million dollars, and its ambitions are correspondingly small. It wants to be funny about decay and sad about love, and it mostly is. What it never does is lecture. No sermon waits at the end of the third act, no character turns to the camera to explain how we ought to live. In an era when even a low-budget genre piece can feel obliged to deliver a civics lesson, this one declines. The result is a film of no social consequence whatsoever, which is not the same as a film without merit. It is simply a small thing, content to be small.