There’s a big hole in the ground at her gravesite, but she doesn’t remember crawling out - or even dying. He could swear he sees his dead girlfriend walking around in there.Įventually the Slocums let him in on the secret that is equally baffling to them: Beth just showed up one night, sweet as can be but suffering a bit of memory loss. They pretend not to be home, though Zach sees movement through the windows. But then they stop answering the door when he visits. Reilly) and Geenie (a just-right Molly Shannon), who treat him like a son. Near catatonic with grief, he takes some comfort from spending time with her parents, Maury ( John C. It’s a perfectly pitched debut that should benefit greatly from word of mouth and, especially given the top-flight comic talents surrounding lead Dane DeHaan, won’t appeal solely to fanboys at the box office.ĭeHaan plays Zach, whose girlfriend Beth Slocum ( Aubrey Plaza) died a few days ago of a snake bite. It’s the one that finds a new metaphoric meaning for zombie tropes, making them about the devastation of grief, and manages to keep us laughing while making that metaphor stick. It’s the one that plucks from the genre playbook only what it wants, then tells its own story while letting the world, in the background, go to hell in the usual way. Zombie Apocalypse: It starts without any explanation, appears to be a localized one, and is quickly dealt with.If Cooties is Sundance 2014’s zombie comedy that hits every note of the well-established format and delights while doing so, Jeff Baena‘s Life After Beth is the one that reminds us how odd the mashup was to begin with.Weirdness Censor: Even as more and more people begin behaving strangely around him, Zack is the only one who seems to notice any of it.
#Life after beth movie synopsis movie#
Some of the more gruesome scenes in the movie are set to it. Soundtrack Dissonance: Due to the zombies' appreciation of smooth jazz, it starts playing pretty much everywhere at some point.Pun-Based Title: Obviously a play on "life after death".Patricide: Beth ends up eating her own father.It's just everyone who recently died comes back as zombies in the area. And the biggest difference, which could play a part in how quickly this particular Zombie Apocalypse is dealt with: they are not contagious. They also have a bizarre fondness for attics, and for some reason, packing the walls in the attics with dirt, and smooth jazz calms them down. Our Zombies Are Different: In this movie, zombies start out with their human personalities, but as their brains decay, they become first absent-minded and forgetful, then increasingly erratic and aggressive, and only after a certain point do they finally become the familiar growling zombies we know and love.Madness Mantra: After Beth is told she's a zombie, she spends several scenes continuously mumbling "I'm dead, I'm alive, I'm dead, I'm alive.".She isn't aware of her own death and has also forgotten that she and Zach broke up right before it happened. Laser-Guided Amnesia: Beth comes back with most of her more recent memories missing.She doesn't seem to be worse-for-wear after the accident. The Jaywalking Dead: Zach accidentally runs over Beth with his car.And Plaza's Heterosexual Life-Partner Anna Kendrick appears as Erica Wexler, Zach's childhood friend.Jim O'Heir and Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza's castmates from Parks and Recreation, appear in this movie: the former has a cameo, the latter provides a voiceover for an in-universe documentary.I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine:.Go Mad from the Revelation: Beth, who was already not herself up until that point, does not take the revelation that she's a zombie lightly: she assaults Zach, steals and crashes his car, and later on starts mumbling a Madness Mantra and kills a guy.