Lee Pace is a Mysterious & Erotic Rock God in the Beguiling Thriller 'After This Death' (Tribeca Review)

It’s really not that difficult to imagine Lee Pace making for a successful cult leader, right? I’d raise my hand if he said he was taking people to the promised land. And After This Death, the latest elliptical and eerily beautiful masterwork from End of the Century director Lucio Castro, leans into that inclination hard by casting Pace as Elliot, a Jared-Leto-esque rock singer whose fans take their devotion to his cryptic songs as seriously as death itself.

A most unfortunate situation for Isobel (Mia Maestro, who also co-starred in End of the Century in a similarly unknowable role) to wander unwittingly into. Married and several months pregnant, Isobel literally stumbles upon Elliot one afternoon while hiking through the woods on her daily constitutional. He’s having a fight with his brother and band-mate Ronnie (Philip Ettinger, so excellent in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed) that she witnesses from behind some bushes; minutes later Isobel and Elliot find themselves flirting in a nearby cave. (And if you’re not feeling the modernized Grimms vibes all of this is giving off already I suggest you start—Red Riding Hood looms real large.)

Isobel has no idea who this odd and alluring man is, and after some banter, they part ways. It’s only a few days later when her good friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie), a well-known music critic, invites Isobel to a concert and she sees Elliot up on stage singing that she realizes she had a brush with big fame inside of that cave. She remains coolly unimpressed though—Isobel, we will learn, is very good at keeping her cards tight. And of course her seeming indifference really revs Elliot’s engine when the two meet up again backstage. Nothing emboldens a narcissist like a challenge.

It’s been said (by me probably) that Lee Pace could cook up killer chemistry with a rock. But the chemistry between him and Maestro really is charged, erotically-speaking, and so it’s no big surprise that Isobel and Elliot from there fall into a fast hot fling. (There will be articles written about the foot scene for years to come, I tell you.) Her husband Ted (Rupert Friend) is always out of town for work and, according to Isobel, always having his own affairs. The two have an arrangement anyway, and so right off the film side-steps the tired dramas we’ve already mapped out in our head about “jealous husbands.” And that’s the thing with Castro’s movies—they are very good at dissolving the story we think we’re watching into something way, way stranger.

After This Death is no different. The romance between Isobel and Elliot is sexy and serious—they seem to bond in deep ways that neither one is anticipating. He and his brother have taken a cabin in the woods to work on their next album but it becomes a lover’s nest instead—as their sexy times stretch out and genuine feelings seem to develop, Isobel even begins to contemplate leaving her husband.

The ticking clock that is Isobel’s pregnancy, always present (and highly eroticized) in their love-making, turns out to be nothing compared to the one that Elliot’s dealing with though—his fans are growing impatient waiting for that next album that’s supposed to be gestating out there in the woods, and strange happenings begin interrupting the solace of the place. Long heralded to be the band’s eleventh and final record, numbers and symbols and enigmatic patches of lyric begin crowding in—the film in turn becomes slipperier from scene to scene, as characters begin disappearing and things we thought we knew become unmoored.

So yes in one way this is yet another thriller about toxic fandom—a sub-genre that’s become all the rage over the past several years with films like Vox Lux, Smile 2, and just last month’s failed The Weeknd vehicle Hurry Up Tomorrow each playing variations on the same themes of creators undone by their flock’s over-attachments and psychoses. But Castro is too elegant and ambiguous a filmmaker to speak so plainly—indeed writing out the plot in this review so far has felt like a betrayal of the actual experiencing of the thing, which is never so straightforward.

As with End of the Century—a film I consider one of the greats of the past twenty years, and this one here can stand proudly beside it—identity is not fixed. And several versions of what’s happening each seem totally possible at all times. Did Isobel really not know who Elliot was when they met? Is Ronnie (always hovering at the edges of the drama) actually Elliot’s brother? Or is he, as Alice suggests, a former lover of Elliot’s? And speaking of Alice—she sure does seem to be an awfully big fan-girl herself. Where does her devotion lay?

If you’re expecting any of this to play out in immediately decipherable ways you’ll probably walk out of After This Death a little dissatisfied. Even that title remains a mystery, although there is violence and yes there is death on hand. Castro knows obsession lies in questions begetting further and further questions, and falling down rabbit holes (hello, Alice!) of what if’s. (And the casting of Jack Haven from the slippery surrealist identity-fuck I Saw the T.V. Glow as the most prominent fan of Elliot’s feels, you know, telling.)

So anything that seemed straightforward at film’s start is unsettled by its end, and that’s just the way any film about obsession should be. The things we obsess over only disassemble beneath intense gaze, after all. Our very gaze is a destabilizing factor. A fairy tale about desire and our undoing betwixt its spell, After This Death is simply put another knockout from Castro, one of the most interesting and evocative directors coming up on the scene. Thick with atmosphere and menace and lust in equal measure, he makes movies that settle over you like a fine mist and which then, before you understand what’s happening, become skin. It won’t let go.