Poster of Life After Beth

Life After Beth

Comedy, Fantasy, Horror

Director: Jeff Baena

Release Date: July 15, 2014

Where to Watch

Life After Beth has a great cast of actors and all the ingredients of a good movie, but somehow it fell short. The parents of Beth and Zack, Beth’s boyfriend, didn’t really match their kids. In what world are Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser producing Dane DeHaan or John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon creating Aubrey Plaza? Maybe Molly Shannon and Aubrey Plaza’s wacky and weird sense of humor and energy make them related in some weird way if you squint hard, but no. And then why does Paul Reiser barely get any lines? It seems like a waste especially with a brief cameo by Garry Marshall. Also it felt like the director worked very hard to create this really interesting Jewish middle class suburb that Plaza and DeHaan seem unrelated to in any way. When I saw that the cut scenes had Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development and Thomas McDonell, I realized that while the lead actor, DeHaan and Plaza, did a great job, they didn’t match their surroundings at all. Either the director needed to cast actors who did or reverse engineer a world that DeHaan and Plaza would plausibly seem like they came from. Life After Beth has serious pacing issues-fine, apocalypse, fine. A lot of great ideas are merely alluded to, but aren’t fully developed: stages of grief, memory versus reality, New versus Old Testament ideas of resurrection. Life After Beth is only a must see for fans of anyone in the cast or if you must see every zombie movie that ever existed, especially for some random zombie characteristic traits that appear in this film alone, otherwise skip it.

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