The depiction of a tsunami roaring up the beach and surging down the main street of an Indonesian seaside resort makes an enthralling opening to Clint Eastwood's latest creation. It's a terrifyingly visceral sequence that grabs you by the throat and forces you to confront the polarities of a comfortable life interrupted by sudden death.
The scene introduces the first of Hereafter's multiple protagonists, French television journalist Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), caught in the disaster as she holidays with her boyfriend and TV producer Didier (Thierry Neuvic). Knocked unconscious in the maelstrom and apparently drowned, Marie belatedly recovers. But her lingering visions of an afterlife, all shadowy figures lit by a sepulchral glow, leave her so shaken and disturbed that she finds she can't continue with her previous life among the chic denizens of the Parisian media set.
However, you can shelve any expectations that you're in for a roller coaster of spectral special effects, because after its 12-bore intro the movie throttles back to a reflective and at times soporific tempo, as Eastwood pits Marie's search for answers to insoluble questions against the parallel journeys of his other characters. Jason and Marcus are adolescent twins from South London (played interchangeably by real-life twins George and Frankie McLaren), doing their best to stay under the same roof as their junkie mother under the beady eye of suspicious social workers. When Jason is run over by a white van, Marcus is left desolate and isolated, unable to cope with his loss.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is a former celebrity psychic who seemingly possesses a genuine gift for contacting the dead. However, carrying the weight of his customers' grief and misery has become too much ("A life that's all about death is no life at all," as he puts it), so he's trying to fashion a more conventional existence in the here and now. This is much to the dismay of his brother Billy (Jay Mohr), a hustling entrepreneur who sees big profits in George's psychic skills.
In collaboration with screenwriter Peter Morgan, Eastwood (pictured right with Cécile de France) has managed to articulate some thought-provoking ideas about grief and the sheer incomprehensibility of dying. Matt Damon is developing into one of the most accomplished screen actors of the last couple of decades, and the way he conveys George's sadness and resignation at the strange burden he's forced to carry is skilfully sustained and quietly moving. Marie's trajectory from glossy media celebrity to slightly pitiable weirdo with an occult obsession is handled with wry sympathy, not least in the way she's promptly replaced as the poster girl for BlackBerry phones by her photogenic TV stand-in (who also supplants her in Didier's bed). A brief appearance by Bryce Dallas Howard as Melanie, who George meets at an Italian cookery class run by the opera-loving Carlo (Steven R Schirripa, alias Bobby Bacala from The Sopranos), is used to hammer home the chaos his clairvoyancy can wreak with personal relationships.
But Hereafter lacks the sprinkling of magic dust which might have successfully blended its disparate characters and plotlines. One solution might have been to drop the Jason and Marcus theme and extract more from the complementary George and Marie characters. As it is, Eastwood has found himself compelled to fabricate an absurd dénouement in which a cascade of coincidences manipulates everybody towards a climax which even Richard Curtis might have balked at. This does permit him to include a richly comic scene in which Derek Jacobi appears as himself at a book signing, the only snag being that it seems to have been cut in from an entirely different movie. Boil it all down, and Hereafter gives you only about 60 per cent pure Essence of Eastwood.
Watch the trailer for Hereafter