Psychic Matt Damon Can't Save Hereafter from Cinematic Limbo

The prospect of Clint Eastwood shifting gears to tackle a paranormal drama that interweaves the lives of three individuals struggling with death and afterlife sounds...promising. The man's been directing films for nearly forty years, he's got skills.

Sadly, his evident talent is nowhere to be found in Hereafter, a film that peaks within minutes of its opening, only to flounder into frustratingly cheap, lazy filmmaking. Much like Invictus, Eastwood demands we feel emotionally moved by what he's deemed "important," and Hereafter suffers for it. Nobody likes being told how to feel.

The film begins with a gut-wrenching depiction of the 2004 Inidan Ocean tsunami, a catastophic event that puts French journalist Marie (Cécile De France) on death's door, only to be fished out of the water and revived at the last minute. As a result, she's left with a connection to the afterlife, which apparently causes her to whisper, be overly introspective and unable to talk about anything bordering interesting.

Across the globe in San Francisco is Matt Damon's John Edwards-like George, who's haunted by ghosts...of his past! But also actual ghosts. George explains to his brother Billy(Jay Mohr) and friend from cooking class Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard) that speaking to the dead, "is not a gift, it's a curse," and that his past career as a psychic is the reason for his lonliness.

In England, a young boy named Marcus copes with the recent death of his twin brother while his heroin-addicted mother gets trashed. An adorable kid, drug abuse, social services, a quest to communicate with a dead twin - the perfect combination for drama, no?

Hereafter strives to mimic the cross-cutting drama seen in Amores Perros or, hell, even Paul Haggis' Crash, but at the end of the day, there's nothing tethering the storylines together. The script (by The Queen and Frost/Nixon writer Peter Morgan) seems determined to deliver heavy lines and dramatic beats on the nose, rarely allowing the film to show anything. Eastwood puts the cherry on his melodramatic sundae with his original score that aims to elicit tears more forefully than waterboarding.

Luckily, Damon's indestructible gravitas brings resonance to his "readings," moments when he's dicating the words of the dead. The scenes are the film's saving grace, but even then, Eastwood is toying with grief audiences may have suffered after losing loved ones, and in the end, that's more aggravating than challenging.

See proof of Hereafter's frazzle-inducing illogic in my Instareview video: