First up, there is another movie with the same title from 2023, I haven’t seen it yet. The image for that is a golden cover with a hand reaching for the sky. Make sure you watch the one with the picture seen on the main page here.

This movie starts with a very curious choice. The opening scene is a woman waking up on a beach, but there appear to be bombs going off. Confused, she simply runs away. After a few minutes of this, she moves her hand to her wrist attempting to take her pulse. At this moment, the camera cuts and turns to face her. Suddenly the first person POV is gone. We see Robin, a woman on the run. But to where? She sees a house in the distance and heads there. When she gets there, she finds three people having sex.

She spends a minute or two watching them. A voyeur hiding in plain sight. But as she looks on, a smoke monster appears and begins darting around the room. Yes, Lost has given a name to anything that darts around and is made of “smoke.” Seb, Livvie, and Patricia are having fun in the face of their new found situation. A fifth person, Onie, is in another room attempting to cut herself but finding nothing happens. 

So… We have a house that contains 5 people that are dead. They are in some sort of purgatory or afterlife space. But we don’t know anything more about it, or why they are there. Robin begins talking to them trying to figure things out, but Seb wants to just enjoy it. Meanwhile, Onie has a tendency to blink out and leave the group behind, but returns after some time. No idea why, but Robin has an idea.

This movie is exploring a lot of ideas of life and dying. A prime one being that we are all sinners from the moment we are born. And that puts even the most devout of individuals into a precarious position of having some degree of stain upon their soul. Which creates an imbalance in the very concept of an afterlife. Because if Heaven is a pristine reward for those who have lived a life without sin (and not going to go down the rabbit hole of religion and forgiveness of sin) then how can anyone ever achieve Heaven? The simple answer is they can’t. 

At this point I was intrigued by the similarity to the tv show The Good Place. An amazing comedy series that I actively avoided the first season of because I didn’t want to watch the sort of religious fare I assumed it was based on the title. I thought it was going to be a funny Heaven Can Wait. I was so wrong. It was an absolute dark delight to watch, and I was sad to see it go. But a core idea that unfolded in that show was that every human was judged based on every action they did in their life, and only if the positive outweighed the negative would you go to Heaven. However, the system was rigged. And we discover that nobody has ever met the impossible standards. 

And that is what this movie also explores. After discovering some of the sins they had engaged in, they discover a way to try and catch the smoke monster (spoiler alert, it’s a Demon!) They manage to extract some info from it leading them to conclude things are not good. But their current reality is on a countdown timer, and they are rapidly running out of time to figure things out. 

I’m avoiding a lot of detail in this, and you can probably anticipate that means I’m going to give this a high rating (also you likely saw the stars when you started reading the review.) This is a thinky movie in ways that go beyond the scope of what is on film. It will get you thinking about what matters in life. What you have done. What you will do. Whether religion is relevant. If anything you do ensures you are going to be damned, then what good is being good? Although I already had views on this and why the idea of a reward based religion is inherently flawed because it entices you to be good to avoid punishment and earn a better afterlife, as opposed to simply not being a bad person because it’s not nice to be a bad person! But this rabbit hole could actually lead to an unexplored subterranean city populated with the Nightbreed. Let’s wrap this up with an 8 star rating and the idea that this is the sort of watch that will expand your thinking. And I love that about stories!