movie review life after beth

Life After Beth

“Life After Beth” gets into the well-tread zombie-comedy territory in a clever and inspired way. Then it doesn’t get out of it nearly so skillfully.

The feature debut from writer-director Jeff Baena , who co-wrote the 2004 existential comedy “ I Heart Huckabees ” with David O. Russell , begins life as a surreal slow burn. Mopey, twenty-ish Zach ( Dane DeHaan ) is mourning the death of his girlfriend, Beth ( Aubrey Plaza , Baena’s real-life girlfriend), who suffered a snakebite while hiking. Unable to let her go, he finds solace by growing closer to her parents, Maury and Geenie ( John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon )—showing up at her house, snuggling in her colorful knit scarf despite the summer heat and staying up all night playing chess (and sharing a joint) with her equally bereft dad.

Baena effectively conveys the fog from which Zach cannot extricate himself, and the disconnect from society that envelops and comforts him. Zach’s own parents ( Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines , in barely-there roles) are helpless and clueless; then again, they hardly even try. And his militant security-guard brother ( Matthew Gray Gubler ) stridently urges him to snap out of it.

But then, on one of his many visits to Beth’s house, Zach thinks he sees fleeting glimpses of her through the windows. And he’s right—because she isn’t really dead. She might have been at one point, but now she’s something else entirely. She looks like Beth and sounds like Beth (for a while, at least) but now she listens to smooth jazz, worries about some vague test she needs to study for and spends way too much time up in the attic. These intriguing personality quirks initially form a central mystery but end up going nowhere.

Because as it turns out—and this isn’t a spoiler, folks—Beth is a straight-up zombie, but she doesn’t know she died in the first place, and her parents don’t want to upset the family’s renewed happiness by telling her. This sets up a few instances of amusing, hectic comedy, but it’s one of many ideas in the movie that don’t feel fully fleshed out, if you’ll pardon the inadvertent pun.

Baena poses a potentially mawkish question—what would you do if you had a second chance at love—in an offbeat, unsentimental way. And that’s the most interesting element of “Life After Beth”: the way it causes us to wonder what state Beth’s in, exactly, whether she’ll be discovered and how far Zach will go to rekindle their romance.

In time, “Life After Beth” morphs from a dark comedy with some glimmers of horror to a straight-up horror film with some glimmers of humor. It’s a tough transition to make. Edgar Wright ’s brilliant “Shaun of the Dead,” to which “Life After Beth” surely will draw comparisons, set the standard for this sort of tonal shift. Beth’s zombiedom, however, leads to an inexplicable uprising of the undead, which ends just as quickly for whatever reason. Did she open some sort of portal? Does everyone think they’re in the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video? Similarly, Baena seems to have glossed over the interior logic when it comes to Beth herself. Sometimes she’s predatory; sometimes she’s romantic. The tension should be building, but instead it just sort of shuffles along.

Zach, meanwhile, is defined exclusively by his grief. Who is he? What does he want to be? What does he like to do? The character is entirely reactive. DeHaan can have an unsettling presence, as he’s shown recently as the villainous Harry Osborn in “ The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ” and as the seductive Lucien Carr in “ Kill Your Darlings .” Here, he just doesn’t get much of a character to play, despite being in every scene.

Plaza seems game as she navigates a huge range, both physically and emotionally—from sweet and demure to confused and excited to unhinged and ravenous. She’s in the tricky spot of having to pull off some of the film’s more complicated combinations of instincts, as she sometimes must be adorable and terrifying at the same time. Her off-kilter appeal serves her well here. If only it were in the service of better material.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Aubrey Plaza as Beth Slocum
Anna Kendrick as Erica Wexler
Molly Shannon as Geenie Slocum
Alia Shawkat as Roz
Cheryl Hines as Judy Orfman
Paul Reiser as Noah Orfman
Dane DeHaan as Zach Orfman
Matthew Gray Gubler as Kyle Orfman
John C. Reilly as Maury Slocum

Director of Photography

Transformers One

American Crime Story: Aaron Hernandez

Speak No Evil (2024)

Saturday Night

The Killer’s Game

Girls Will Be Girls

The 4:30 Movie

Sweetheart Deal

TIFF 2024: Table of Contents

TIFF 2024: Village Keeper, 40 Acres, Flow

TIFF 2024: The Shadow Strays, Friendship, The Shrouds

TIFF 2024: Babygirl, All We Imagine as Light, Queer

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

Life After Beth Is a Zombie Comedy That Coasts on Its Stars’ Charms Before Deciding to Devour Itself

Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that’s better before the innards hit the fan, when it’s a sad teen-breakup drama with a streak of the supernatural. Dane DeHaan is Zach, the lovelorn boy whose girlfriend, Beth (Aubrey Plaza), has just broken up with him in a way that might or might not be conclusive. (It happens before the film begins.) In any case, he believes things to be unfinished, and they’re destined to remain so after Beth dies in a freak accident. Irresolution intensifies his pain: Is he grieving for her death, their breakup, or both? What role should he play with her parents (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon) — boyfriend or ex? Depending on whether he meets someone he likes as much, Zach could remain in that emotional twilight zone for the rest of his life. Then he spies Beth through the window of her parents’ house. She certainly doesn’t look dead.

The movie, written and directed by Jeff Baena, is never particularly subtle, and the suburban-Jewish stereotypes in the first scenes feel cheap. But inconclusiveness is a wonderful state for a black comedy, and the scenes between Zach and the resurrected Beth are sublimely creepy. She’s not quite the same person — she doesn’t remember the breakup or that she, well, died. But she’s close enough to make Zach want to return to their old life, to believe . There are rather broad hints that something’s amiss, however. Her preference for the attic. Her bad smell. Her superhuman strength. Worst of all is her sudden taste for smooth jazz.

It’s the chemistry of DeHaan and Plaza that puts the movie’s first half over. DeHaan is so hollow-eyed and cadaverous that he might be a zombie himself. And Plaza can go right up to the edge of the Jewish Princess cliché without tipping over. Her limbs are slightly out of synch, her rhythms close to the trancelike whimsical patter on the Chainsmokers’ brilliant “#SELFIE .” But she’s also emotionally hungry , and the poor sap boyfriend hangs on her every strange demand. When Zach’s mother (Cheryl Hines) sets him up with another girl (the alluringly edgy Anna Kendrick), he’s visibly relieved by the relative normalcy of the scene — until Beth shows up and turns (almost literally) rabid.

Sudden jolts of thrash guitar add to excellent discordancy, and there are nice turns by Reilly; Matthew Gray Gubler as Zach’s skinny, high-strung brother (he’s like DeHaan stretched out); and Garry Marshall as Grandpa. But the last section of Life After Beth is crushingly routine. It’s not just that it’s the by-now-overfamiliar comic zombie splatter. It’s that throws the movie off course. It’s a cop-out. The gold standard for this sort of thing is Shaun of the Dead , where Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg managed to use zombie mayhem to deepen our understanding of the existing relationships. This is more like, “Forget all that other stuff. Let’s eat some flesh!” The effect is oddly bloodless.

movie review
life after beth
dane dehaan
aubrey plaza

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

Lower case letters (a-z)
Upper case letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

83% Speak No Evil Link to Speak No Evil
77% Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Link to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
96% Rebel Ridge Link to Rebel Ridge

New TV Tonight

89% The Penguin: Season 1
89% High Potential: Season 1
83% American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez: Season 1
40% Frasier: Season 2
17% Emmys: Season 76
-- Agatha All Along: Season 1
-- Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: Season 2
-- Twilight of the Gods: Season 1
100% Tulsa King: Season 2
-- A Very Royal Scandal: Season 1

Life After Beth Reviews

Even if it delivers a number of expected jokes and gags, there's enough surprising elements that are brought to life by an immensely talented cast of comedians to entirely elevate the material.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

In the long tradition of zombie metaphors, the whole movie stands as an allegory for dealing with the heartache of loss, be it the loss of life, or simply a bad breakup where the other party seems to become a raging monster afterward.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza go for the jugular with undead laughs in a zombie rom-com.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2021

Offers up something different and a little scary. Beth's return from the dead works quite brilliantly as a metaphor on the strong feelings that typify teenage love.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

Baena's comical mourning period marks a fine return to the personal zombie movie - one that's not been seen since 2004's Shaun of The Dead.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 15, 2019

A zombie film lacking in brains is nothing new, but this derivative, clunky, albeit faintly charming pastiche is a totally forgettable experience that proves "sometime dead is bettah".

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2019

Life After Beth is well-made, has some good moments and is worth seeing for Reilly alone. It just doesn't fully embrace its horror aspects, while still wanting to own them, and that comes across more as ambivalence than uniqueness.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jan 11, 2019

Amusing and charming little rom-zom-com, though perhaps a little too indie for its own good.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 2, 2018

[Aubrey Plaza] clearly has fun with her undead role.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2018

This is a weird mess from start to finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 19, 2018

If any of this sounds funny: it isn't. In fact, it's pretty sad.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2017

Whilst not truly awful it just didn't work well on any level for me and it missed most of its marks.

Full Review | Nov 14, 2016

Going in expecting one thing and getting another is always going to throw you off.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2016

Life After Beth remains a mildly funny film in search of a director with some bite.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jun 21, 2016

Plaza gives the film its motor, and if Baena's control of the material is occasionally uncertain, 'Life After Beth' plays best when it feeds off her manic, gonzo energy, and runs with it.

Full Review | Jun 18, 2016

Life After Beth is an irritatingly undeveloped project. A charming cast and a few moments of inspired lunacy make it passingly worthwhile for genre fans.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 1, 2014

At least it strays from the well-worn romantic comedy formula, but this sketchy tale of suburban teenage obsession struggles to expand its one-joke premise.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2014

Though it stumbles in some cases, "Life After Beth" is a solid zombie romance with some real teeth to it.

Full Review | Oct 12, 2014

Getting people in creepy makeup to gurn and shuffle and get shot isn't automatically scary plus hilarious.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 5, 2014

Plaza steals the show with one foot in the grave, her rotting heroine ricocheting between adolescent snarkiness and cadaverous rage, a lethal combination of which no one around her has the measure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 5, 2014

Cast & crew
User reviews

Life After Beth

A young man's recently deceased girlfriend mysteriously returns from the dead, but he slowly realizes she is not the way he remembered her. A young man's recently deceased girlfriend mysteriously returns from the dead, but he slowly realizes she is not the way he remembered her. A young man's recently deceased girlfriend mysteriously returns from the dead, but he slowly realizes she is not the way he remembered her.

Aubrey Plaza
Dane DeHaan
John C. Reilly
97 User reviews
152 Critic reviews
50 Metascore
6 nominations

Top cast 30

Beth Slocum

Zach Orfman

Maury Slocum

Geenie Slocum

Judy Orfman

Noah Orfman

Kyle Orfman

Erica Wexler

(scenes deleted)

Supermarket Stocker

Chip the Mailman

News Anchor

Diner Sommelier

(as Elizabeth Jayne)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Nick Offerman can be heard narrating the documentary on Machu Pichu in the beginning of the film. One of the several ties to Aubrey Plaza 's role in the series Parks and Recreation (2009) .
Goofs When Zach is inside the MRI scanner, he would not have been allowed to lift his head to look down as this would affect image acquisition. Also, it would not be possible for him to see his mother sitting in a chair reading a magazine as he stared down through the bore of the scanner. MRI scanners produce high magnetic fields and for safety reasons, the waiting area will not be in such close proximity to the scanner.

Erica Wexler : I'm so sorry about Beth, by the way. Your mom talked to my mom about it.

Zach Orfman : I used to really want her to come back.

Erica Wexler : Of course.

Zach Orfman : But things are really complicated between us, you know? Like kind of fucked up.

Erica Wexler : Right.

Zach Orfman : Now, I just kind of wish she would stay dead.

Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Vin Diesel/Aubrey Plaza/Will.i.am (2014)
Soundtracks Smooth Sax Composed by Steve Jeffries Courtesy of APM Music

User reviews 97

Reno-Rangan
Mar 13, 2016

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 29 minutes

More to explore

Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)

General Disdain
Movie Reviews
6 responses
--> September 13, 2014

Life After Beth (2014) by The Critical Movie Critics

Getting hungry.

You can say this about Life After Beth , the indie zombie romantic comedy (zom-rom-com?) by first time director, Jeff Baena: Aubrey Plaza (2012’s “ Safety Not Guaranteed ”) makes for a great zombie. With her deadpan delivery and soulless eyes, she doesn’t have to do much to look and act like the dead reawakened.

Don’t get me wrong, this is actually a good thing, as Dane DeHaan (2014’s “ The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ”) provides all the life the picture needs. He is Zach, Beth’s boyfriend, err, ex-boyfriend who is visibly distraught when his girlfriend dies unexpectedly from a snake bite while on a hike alone. She flamenco danced alone too and these things he chose to not do with her is causing him guilt and to wish he had spent those times with her. As luck would have it, Beth suddenly reappears days after her funeral, seemingly normal but confused. A resurrection her parents, Maury (John C. Reilly, 2014’s “ Guardians of the Galaxy ”) and Geenie (Molly Shannon, cast member of “Saturday Night Live”) believe. Something else according to Zach, but fuck it, it’s a second chance to do all things he wished he’d done with Beth the first time she was alive.

But what starts out as a second chance at love quickly devolves into anarchy as zombies roaming the streets tend to make happen.

How the dead came to rewalk upon the Earth is anybody’s guess, Jeff Baena (who also wrote the script) doesn’t fumble with that minor detail. Or that people, so consumed with their own slice of reality, pay no attention to the situation unfolding around them. Until, of course, the reanimated mailman (Jim O’Heir, “Parks and Recreation” television series) or the shortorder cook start deteriorating before their eyes (don’t you dare ask how they managed to get their jobs back either). It’s soon a life or death situation but not for Zach who has discovered spine-cringingly bad smooth jazz calms the raging zombie (a well-placed bullet calms ‘em permanently too).

It’s tough to not appreciate Baena’s purposeful oversight of the larger implications surrounding the zombie apocalypse plaguing the town and parts unknown. That can be left to the likes of “ World War Z ” and its sequels. The fact Beth is a flesh-eating zombie is coolly treated like just another one of her idiosyncrasies — not one of those cute ones like snortling though — but rather like one that eventually wears a man down and makes him wish he was somewhere else with someone else. In Zach’s case that someone else is family friend, Erica Wexler (Anna Kendrick, 2013’s “ Drinking Buddies ”) who shows up at just the right time to get Zach thinking it may be best to leave the past dead and buried.

A lifeless smooch.

The pairing of Aubrey and Dane together is an odd choice, but then again it could be said the romantic pairing of anyone with Aubrey Plaza would be odd. In Plaza’s defense, however, she’s given more freedom to flesh out her character to be something other than the wry, smartass she is usually equated with being. Here she is cute and flirty and vibrant (full of life, perhaps?), so when we see the struggle her Beth is trying to come to terms with (akin to watching someone slipping into dementia) we sympathize. We don’t want to happen to her what we know has to happen to her.

But we sympathize more for Zach who effectively loses the love of his life twice. And because this wide-eyed in love kid is surrounded by a rabid, gun loving brother (Matthew Gray Gubler, “Criminal Minds” television series) and inattentive parents (Cheryl Hines, 2013’s “Cold Turkey” and Paul Reiser, “Mad About You” television series) who are completely indifferent to his plight. DeHaan manages to play Zach for some good teen angst laughs, but by the end of Life After Beth he shows Zach has undergone a fair amount of maturing.

Ultimately everyone left alive has grown up some, including the audience. And that it takes a quirky, romantic-comedy involving an undead girl and her living boyfriend to remind us there are no redos in life and to not put off until tomorrow what can be done today is proof of that.

Tagged: dating , girlfriend , zombie

I'm an old, miserable fart set in his ways. Some of the things that bring a smile to my face are (in no particular order): Teenage back acne, the rain on my face, long walks on the beach and redneck women named Francis. Oh yeah, I like to watch and criticize movies.

Movie Review: Ghosted (2023) Movie Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Movie Review: Fantasy Island (2020) Movie Review: Snatched (2017) Movie Review: Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) Movie Review: ABCs of Death 2 (2014) Movie Review: The Possession of Michael King (2014)

'Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)' have 6 comments

September 13, 2014 @ 8:39 pm PrairieDog

I wasn’t a big fan of it. I felt it lost its identity halfway through.

September 13, 2014 @ 8:51 pm BUZZ-AMD

Reviewer, this movie affected you that much? So much that you hugged your mother and told her you loved her? Really? I don’t believe it for a second.

September 13, 2014 @ 11:03 pm General Disdain

She lives across the country so I couldn’t physically give her a hug. She did get a “love ya.”

September 13, 2014 @ 9:14 pm Toyota Camry

I despise everything about Aubrey Plaza. She is an unfunny bitch. An ugly person to the heart.

September 13, 2014 @ 9:30 pm Dominique

I’ll be on the watch for it on Netflix.

September 14, 2014 @ 2:48 am Pluma

It tried to hard to be alt

I don’t like films like that

| Log in

Den of Geek

Life After Beth Review

Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza find out if love and zombiehood mix in this dark horror comedy. Read our review!

Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
Share on email (opens in a new tab)

Life After Beth begins with a seemingly innocuous image of Beth (Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation ) strolling through the woods on a hike. All seems normal except for the atonal guitar chords ringing on the soundtrack — courtesy of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club — that tell us something ominous is afoot. It is that mix of the mundane and the unsettling that is both this movie’s strongest asset and weakest element, as writer/director Jeff Baena attempts to balance the tone of this quirky little horror comedy with mixed results.

The film cuts from that opening image to a funeral: Beth, it turns out, was bitten by a snake on her hike and is dead, leaving behind her devastated boyfriend Zach (Dane DeHaan, fresh off The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ) and equally grief-stricken parents Maury (John C. Reilly) and Geenie (Molly Shannon). In the aftermath, Zach clings to Beth’s favorite scarf and her parents, hanging around their house, having long talks with Maury and even confessing that he and Beth were having relationship trouble in their last few weeks together.

Then suddenly Maury and Geenie don’t want to see Zach anymore and stop returning his calls. Distraught, he visits their house unannounced – and discovers that Beth is back from the dead, with no memory of dying and confused memories of everything else before that. Although Zach wants things to go back to “normal,” it’s clear early on that whatever “normal” is, it’s no longer part of the language of Zach and Beth’s relationship, especially when she begins acting in a disturbingly violent manner and eventually hungering for human flesh.

The “zom-com” has been surfacing more and more often in recent times, with last year’s tepid Warm Bodies being the latest example until now. But while that was a hopeful if homogenized tale of love actually solving the zombie problem, Life After Beth is instead about letting go: letting go of a failed relationship, letting go of a deceased loved one, even letting go of the lifestyle and culture you are comfortably settled in. Beth is not the only reanimated corpse in town, you see, and despite signs of something terrible happening around them, many of this story’s characters attempt to carry on with their everyday lives while ignoring the signs of catastrophe around them.

Ad – content continues below

Thankfully we don’t really see much of a widespread zombie plague — we’ve had enough of those on TV and the big screen — until the final third of the film, and Baena (who co-wrote David O. Russell’s weird I Heart Huckabees ) makes his one big change to zombie lore by allowing them to come back almost as they were before they died. That’s how Zach, Maury and Geenie first experience the resurrected Beth, but it’s their insistence on pretending that nothing is wrong that allows Zach to ignore the patch of rotting flesh on Beth’s thigh and have sex with her, while her parents casually wave off the fact that she is building a makeshift grave in the attic.

It’s these little morbid touches that I ultimately found captivating about Life After Beth , and which make it an uneasy and even creepy viewing experience even as one chuckles at the absurd humor (the story owes something to Robert Bloch’s great short story, “A Case of the Stubborns”). Plaza’s offbeat performance also treads that fine line, and her tantrums are both child-like and frightening — she’s like a toddler trapped in the body of a homicidal maniac. Less effective is DeHaan, who doesn’t quite get his timing down in his first comedy and whose Zach veers too far into whininess. Reilly and Shannon — along with Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser as Zach’s parents — are fairly funny if a bit too broad to come alive as fully realized characters (Anna Kendrick adds some sparkle as a prospective new romance for Zach).

You can eventually sense Baena struggling to get the story across the finish line, and it feels too long for its own good, but Life After Beth still has enough queasy charm — and that no-holds-barred performance from Plaza — to make it just entertaining enough. More worrisome to me is that, in the broader scheme of things, Life After Beth doesn’t really add much to a genre that has been stretched to the breaking point by its acceptance into mass culture. Zombies are soon due to fall out of favor with the public, and while Life After Beth doesn’t really nudge them toward the cliff, it doesn’t do a whole lot to keep them from falling either.

Life After Beth is out in theaters today (Friday, August 15).

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+ , if that’s your thing!

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

Life After Beth Review

03 Oct 2014

Life After Beth

Jeff Baena's deadpan domestic zombie apocalypse goes out of its way not to actually articulate any rules or reasons for its own idiosyncratic outbreak. There’s no explanation of why the dead are digging themselves out of their graves, although there is a Romero-like suggestion that the zombies are returning to what they knew: jobs as postmen or diner chefs, old haunts, former addresses. They have rage issues, but find “smooth jazz” calming. And again, for reasons left opaque, they prefer to live in mud-lined loft spaces. “I fought in World War II and I know attics,” is a particularly choice non sequitur from revenant Grandpa Orfman (Garry Marshall).

Tonally Life After Beth is not at all about Shaun-style splatstick, and far more along the lines of Jay and Mark Duplass’ Cyrus. That film starred John C. Reilly, again perfectly cast here as Beth’s doting father Maury Slocum, and cannily paired with Molly Shannon as his wife Geenie. The relishably insensitive Orfmans — Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines as Zach’s (Dane DeHaan) parents, as well as Matthew Gray Gubler as his gun-nut brother — are also excellent, while Anna Kendrick plies her usual sweetness as Zach’s potential post-Beth romantic interest. DeHaan, playing it half-creepy as a not-at-all-obvious romantic lead, seems more at home here than the bigger-budget likes of the Spider-Man films.

Admittedly, everyone is cast to type... but then there’s Aubrey Plaza, sinking her teeth into a role that lets her literally chew the scenery. With an arc that takes her from something resembling Beth’s perky old self to a muttering, twitching, gurning wreck strapped to an oven, it’s not necessarily a performance you’d expect if you’re only familiar with her Parks And Recreation work. But the fact that one of her earliest roles was as ‘Girl With Massive Headwound’ in the short Killswitch suggests, perhaps, a long-standing but un-indulged affinity for gory prosthetics.

Life After Beth Movie Review

Is this zom-rom-com worth your while?

By Nick Venable | Updated 2 months ago

Life After Beth came out at a weird time. It takes a bright mind to bring new life to the zombie film these days, and even more so for the sub-genre of romantic zombie horror/comedies. Not because the subject matter is extremely difficult or anything; there just happens to be a dearth of bright minds behind the endless stream of undead-centered movies churned out on a yearly basis.

While it has its share of tonal problems, Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, Life After Beth , stands far above the middle ground with exuberant performances from a star-studded cast and a sincerely bizarre sense of humor.

Baena, who co-wrote David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees , also wrote the screenplay for Life After Beth , which hones in on one particular instance of the dead rising, set on the outskirts of a larger outbreak.

After a lovely opening that gives audiences their only peek into Aubrey Plaza’s Beth while she’s properly alive, the film settles in on Zach (Dane DeHaan), a young man anxiously grieving over Beth’s death-by-snakebite.

Unable to find closure for a relationship that was in mid-turmoil, Zach pals up to Beth’s parents, Maury and Geenie, played with gleefully unhinged paranoia by John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. But that friendship takes a strong left turn once he makes a certain discovery.

Beth is alive again! Or still! And her parents want to keep that a secret from everyone. Beth has no recollection of her death, and her symptoms include further memory problems, mood swings, and an increasingly gnarly physical presence.

Nearly zero exposition goes into Beth’s new zombified state, which is refreshing but also suspect, as no one really asks the surrogate Life After Beth audience question of, “What the hell is going on?” But I didn’t let it bother me, choosing to ride out the erratic waves of comedy and drama without thinking too hard.

Zach is overjoyed at having his girlfriend back, particularly because she doesn’t remember their final days together. All he wants to do is tell her the things he never got to say.

In some respects, the first half of Life After Beth is one of the more relatable romances put to film in recent years. Things do get rather haywire once Beth’s cannibalistic nature starts taking over, and the story veers towards average zombie-movie tropes in the third act. Still, by sticking with its main characters and avoiding the ground zero of the zombie crisis, Baena won me over.

When it comes to the laughs over the romance, Life After Beth loses some of its surefootedness, bouncing from broad slapstick to situational comedy to visceral physical humor. And all without having any actual “jokes” in it, which was weird.

For me, most of that worked in the film’s favor, keeping me on my toes, but I can understand how it might fall flat with others. Still, know that “Zach-erdoodle-doo” is one of the best lines in the movie, and the way Zach resolves the situation offers up one of the most visually pleasing payoffs you could hope for. I was clapping before I even realized it.

Everyone in this Life After Beth cast is on their A-game, though DeHaan’s overstated energy made it seem like he was told to base his performance on Spanish soap operas.

Aubrey Plaza is a treat as she shifts from cutesy girlfriend to dull-eyed drone, really letting loose once her hunger kicks in. (If there was an award for Best Performance While Strapped to a Stove, she would win it hands down.) Reilly and Shannon are perfectly warped as two parents longing for a past in which they were neglectful.

Zach’s parents are played in Life After Beth by an underused Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser, though Matthew Gray Gubler turns in a memorable performance as Zach’s prim and overly aggressive brother Kyle.

Anna Kendrick pops by as a flirty old classmate of Zach’s who gets thrown into the mess, and Plaza’s Parks and Recreation co-star Jim O’Heir appears briefly as a newly arisen mailman.

While his screenwriting’s mileage varies, I found Baena’s Life After Beth direction to be solid throughout, even if none of the sequences outside of the climax are particularly memorable. There was an indie energy behind the camerawork, which never got too shaky, and there is always something relevant or interesting happening onscreen.

Whether it’s bigger moments like people walking away from flaming structures or smaller details like Beth’s attic project or men standing around in their underwear, Life of Beth never feels like Baena took the wrong step in how he chose to tell this story visually.

Life After Beth is a film much more suited to home viewing on VOD or Blu-ray/DVD, where its low-budget charms can live on outside of big-screen expectations.

That said, it makes one wonder why Aubrey Plaza hasn’t yet catapulted to Hollywood’s elite the way Chris Pratt has. Maybe Marvel should come knocking on her door…just not for any Marvel Zombies movies, please.

Sitcom Star Killed Off Because He Dissed His TV Wife

Han Solo Never Really Died In Star Wars

Origin Of Earth’s Largest Extinction Event Discovered

Long-Awaited DC Sequel Will Be Hard R-Rated Horrorfest

City-Killer Asteroid On Track To Impact Earth

Forget Marvel, You Can Stream Most Of Scarlett Johansson’s Best Movies Without Disney+

The Best Adam Sandler Movies Ranked From Good To Great

It Cast: What Happened To Them After Their Stephen King Movie

The Best Jamie Foxx Movies To Stream Right Now

Breaking now.

X-Men Star Embarrassed Himself In Front Of Celebrity Crush

47 mins ago

The Best Top Gun Knock Off Launched Its Own Wildly Successful Franchise

Tom Cruise Olympic Stunt Cost Is Unbelievable

Hazardous Asteroid Passes Dangerously Close To Earth

2 hours ago

Celebrities
Secret Invasion
The Marvels
Disney Plus
Apple TV Plus
Dwayne Johnson
Brie Larson
Ryan Reynolds
The Witcher
About & Advertising
Affiliate Policy
Privacy Policy

Life After Beth Review

Ever since Warm Bodies discovered the mainstream appeal of romance in a time of zombies, I’d been wondering how long it would take for other filmmakers to cash in on the rotting flesh of young love. Trying to love a zombie isn’t exactly the easiest feat, no matter how beautiful those cold, dead eyes look, but at least there’s hope throughout Warm Bodies , showing a zombie transforming back to his mortal form.

Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth is a role-reversal horror dramedy not about finding love, but instead losing love, finding it once again as a shambling zombie, and then somehow letting go. Beth Slocum inexplicably (Aubrey Plaza) comes back from the grave looking human enough, minus some heavy bags under her eyes and the snake bite that originally caused her death, and her grieving boyfriend Zach (Dane DeHaan) couldn’t be happier. But what starts as a miracle quickly turns into fear, uncertainty and absolute chaos as Beth slowly becomes more and more zombie like, and all Zach can do is watch – while noticing other deceased townspeople wandering the streets once again. It’s the zombie apocalypse, but all this heartbroken teen cares about is saving his dead girlfriend – how romantic?

Of course, the entire movie is a metaphor for letting go of a relationship no matter how hard it may seem. You’ll always remember your first love, no matter how disastrous the experience might have been, because you’ll never have your heart broken the same way again. This is the reality Zach is living, as it’s slowly revealed that these two lovebirds may have been experiencing a rough patch before Beth’s untimely death, but Beth’s “resurrection” gives Zach another chance. Blinded by grief, the idealistic boy visualizes a world where he does everything “right” and love conquers all, or in other terms, do all the things he never actually wanted to do with Beth.

Baena’s story channels our blinding instincts to grasp onto compromising comfort instead of letting go and embracing the pain, bringing a bluntness to our very protective nature when faced with hurtful choices. Letting go is never easy, especially when your girlfriend slowly is developing a hunger for your meaty brains, and Baena strikes a sweet, sorrowful chord amongst the grieving Romeos and Juliettes, thinking hearts can never be resuscitated after being stomped out for the first time.

Despite being a Shakespearean tragedy with a pinch more zombie gore and explosions, Life After Beth has a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome in that half of Baena’s film saunters along with stinging emotions and ridiculous fun, while the side we despise – the Jekyll – appears flat, soulless, and absolutely winded. Aubrey Plaza has moments of pure undead brilliance as Beth, inarguably the highest moments Baena achieves, but a creeping lifelessness invades other scenes of failed zombie comedy, creating a wishy-washy contrast without much fluidity. Scenes feel inconsequential while Baena is establishing his apocalyptic scenario, as the confusing epidemic sweeps Zach’s paint-by-numbers town without much danger besides hearing gunshots far off in the distance – an aspect Baena never really explains.

This isn’t something I’m used to saying, but John C. Reilly feels extremely under-utilized in his role as Beth’s father. Teaming with comedian Molly Shannon, the Slocums never break from their modern-day Leave It To Beaver family dynamic, now complete with a zombie daughter. Refusing to explore any alternative reasoning for their daughter’s return, undead monster or not, Reilly employs a string of preventative tactics in the hope of never telling Beth about her accident – but his overly stern demeanor never quite meshes with Life After Beth ‘s darkly humorous tone. Zach isn’t the only character struggling with letting go, but Reilly’s obsession with keeping his sweet, innocent daughter alive doesn’t hold the same lovestruck gravity, nor is his outlandish comedic presence exploited properly. The whole blissfully-ignorant-Jewish-father look doesn’t really suit Reilly, and along with Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines, the trio become lost amidst an actual zombie apocalypse – only worrying about cleaning the blood off of their neatly-ironed shirts.

As expected, Life After Beth is Aubrey Plaza’s show to run, and the young funnywoman does so with a lively vigor while playing an undead girlfriend. It takes a lot to inject life into the lifeless, but Beth is an uproarious zombie character thanks to Plaza’s uninhibited, relentless, and uncaged performance tactics that really call on such an expansive range of emotions. Blending romantic comedy situations with fearful horror themes, Plaza has to go from loving companion to hungry monster in the blink of an eye, and she does so with tremendous success while keeping an angsty teenage personality even when munching brains. Beth could have easily been a one-trick-poney, but her character scores some serious laughs when dealing with elements that come along with craving flesh. Baena creates an unconventional look at becoming a zombie, as Beth remains aware of her transformation as in other classics like Return Of The Living Dead , but it’s Plaza’s tremendous talents that make her shambling Susie Q an adorable horror character who will win the hearts of genre fans and mainstream audiences alike.

Life After Beth is much more an analysis of relationships than squeamish horror movie, unearthing a bittersweet discovery inside DeHaan’s character Zach. When we lose what we love, our instincts are always to somberly look backwards instead of forwards, obsessing over what we could have done differently to prevent an inevitably hurtful breakup – but life is about moving forward. Baena is the mad scientist behind such a mashup of genres, and while he supplies a pleasantly heartfelt, tender romance, Life After Beth does suffer from a bit of Rigor mortis, bogged down by a silly concept that doesn’t embrace zombie lore for everything it’s worth. Aubrey Plaza has rapidly become one of my favorite actresses, and DeHaan’s chemistry unites these two destined lovers, but besides a tender message about letting go, Baena’s film is a bit slow to the punch – but still ends up a winner none the less.

His Three Daughters. (L-R) Natasha Lyonne as Rachel, Elizabeth Olsen as Christina and Carrie Coon as Katie in His Three Daughters. Cr. Sam Levy/Netflix © 2024.

COMING SOON
OUT NOW - US
COMING SOON - US

COMPETITIONS

Eye For Film >> Movies >> Life After Beth (2014) Film Review

Life after beth.

Reviewed by: Andrew Robertson

As the saying goes, when there are no more ideas in Hollywood the dead will walk the Earth. A second feature for writer director Jeff Baena of I Heart Huckabees , this is a sunshiny star-studded zombie romantic comedy. It's not as bereft of wit as it is of originality, but it is another member of a plague of comic catastrophes.

The titular Beth is Aubrey Plaza, one of the Slocums, a family in grief, mother Molly Shannon, father John C Reilly. Beth died, leaving everyone distraught, especially boyfriend Zach (Orfman), played by Dane Dehan. His brother is played by Matthew Gray Gubler, his mother by Cheryl Hines, and his father by Paul Reiser. It's a ridiculous cast, full of familiar faces, but it's that very familiarity that's Life After Beth's biggest weakness.

Using genre to explore relationships isn't anything new - at Edinburgh's 2014 there are at least two: Coherence , which is to love stories involving alternate realities what a guillotine is to a sliding door, and The Infinite Man , which perfectly explores the futility of trying to be perfect. If you're looking for zombies instead of other violations of causality and the natural order, you're also well catered to. Unlike Shaun Of The Dead , however, this is less a loving homage to a genre and its tropes than a seemingly cynical exercise in film making.

It's not without fun - this is what makes it frustrating - there are moments that might explain what's going on, and a quest for answers says more about prejudices than the audience initially believes. There are some jokes that are genuinely amusing, minor character notes as simple as choice and quantity of beverage or the presence of a Desert Eagle. It's the most powerful handgun in the world according to Eighties action movies, but it's not a detail that's laboured. Indeed, when it's in its stride LAB is light, even breezy; it allows some of the cast to trade on their previous casting by acting against type, but on other occasions it relies on their presence to create a comic mood and it feels less experimental and alternative than, well, the zombie genre demands.

As a "boy loses girl, girl comes back from the dead, relationship is re-evaluated" movie it pretty thoroughly aims to be a zom rom com, but that was funny when there was only one, and now it feels, well, lifeless. It's probable, even likely, that the perceived cynicism in production is in part a reflection of the soulless nature of your reviewer, but it's still there. It's foregrounded by the extent to which the film trades on the tropes, including the score with its electronics and its electric guitar, the music provided by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a band who take their name from another movie. There is also a quantity of smooth jazz, but it just leads to comparisons with Mars Attacks .

It's good, indeed, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but it suffers from the same kind of homegenity that means in any big city one is rarely more than a few hundred yards from pulled pork in brioche or a burger with a component to which the word 'artisinal' has been applied. There's got to be something different out there, something new - this is the same old flesh in a different wrapper. In a field bereft of competition Life After Beth would be in with more than a ghost of a chance, but while it's amusing enough to woo audiences it's not haunting.

Director: Jeff Baena

Writer: Jeff Baena

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Alia Shawkat, Matthew Gray Gubler, Dane DeHaan, John C Reilly, Cheryl Hines, Molly Shannon, Thomas McDonell, Paul Reiser, Paul Weitz, Eva La Dare, Zoë Worth, Jenna Nye, Bechir Sylvain

Runtime: 90 minutes

Country: US

Search database:

If you like this, try:

News & Features

Life After Beth

What is Life After Beth ? The directorial debut of I Heart Huckabee's co-writer Jeff Baena feels like its at the intersection of John Waters and David Lynch in its depiction of suburbia. It's where pale-faced young Zach ( Dane DeHaan ) wastes the days away pining for his dead girlfriend Beth ( Aubrey Plaza ), listlessly counting the hours with his banal parents and militaristic brother. Like most depictions of suburbia, there's something that feels frozen about this place – it takes place in a contemporary world, but the milieu feels like it could be from 1989, or 1994, or 2002. Zach's emotions are downright apocalyptic: he'll never love again, ergo nothing will ever change.

His escape comes from the relatively chill presence of Beth's parents ( John C. Reilly , Molly Shannon), who quietly grieve in private. But one day, he's no longer invited over. The Slocums' disappear, leaving Zach alone in his existential void. When he forces himself back into their lives, mostly in search of a grief partner, he finds Beth. Alive and well, she embraces Zach like nothing had ever happened. Purposely keeping her in the dark, her parents proclaim it a “miracle.” Their panicked search for justification over meaning is a sly commentary on religion, particularly considering we're dealing with a fully resurrected character.

The film slowly doles out hints regarding what we can gather from the film's presold premise: Beth is a full-blown flesh-eating zombie. The movie trafficks in well-worn staples of the genre: a bite turns you into one, the skin randomly decays. It also plays fast and loose with the rest of the zombie rules, knowing full well that audiences only know a couple. Which is maddening from a storytelling perspective. Beth lurches from articulate but manic, to deranged and shouting. At first it seems like there's meaning behind the fact that smooth jazz calms her, but it only turns out to be a dumb gag of violence and bloodshed occurring while a sax wails on the soundtrack. The first couple of times, it's sort of amusing.

Life After Beth is content to meander a bit throughout its runtime, ditching story momentum in favor of its overqualified cast. Plaza is very funny as the cursed Beth, and you forgive the film's inconsistent characterization simply because of the dedication to mental instability. When she goes full-on feral (which is something that inexplicably fluctuates), Plaza absolutely transformers , and you have to remind yourself it's the same actress from earlier who was kissing and flirting with our lead. Reilly and Shannon are excellent casting decisions not because they're funny people but because they understand how to mine comic material for the humanity within. Anna Kendrick shows up as a potential new girlfriend for Zach, and their chemistry so warm (and Kendrick's smile so typically radiant) that you don't mind that she seems considerably older than him and that the film doesn't know what to do with her.

At about the hour mark, the movie feels like it runs out of ideas as it half-heartedly commits to the genre-trappings of a zombie movie. On a budget, the zombie apocalypse occurs – Baena stumbles upon a funny idea of having the dead rise and return right back to their homes, where they kvetch about the current tenants as they decompose. But it's merely a cheap sight gag, one of many that buoys the mixed messages of the end, which lets Beth's ferocity function as an excuse for why she becomes a prop to allow Zach to let go. The metaphor feels like a mess here: does Zach need to let go because Beth is dead? Because she's standing right over there, and she's still got thoughts and opinions, and she still loves you. Or does Zach need to get out of a teenage relationship to live an adult life? Is he even going to college? And what was a pre-death Beth even like?

DeHaan in particular is such an interesting, intense actor, with obvious shades of DiCaprio. As he is the butt of various zombie jokes, playing off Plaza, you wonder, why is he here? This film needed more of a casual everyman struggling to make sense out of the supernatural. It needs direct, simple emotions from an actor who can convey broad, simple ideas. But DeHaan is more haunted, driven, and the jury's out on whether he can actually do comedy. The film insists its something of a light comedy with horror undertones, but it keeps mis-stepping into brutality and cynicism almost out of obligation. At its end, it's still trying to convince you of the romantic comedy aspect of the entire affair, but as soon as DeHaan grabs a gun, you might get sick of all these genres at war with each other.

Dylan O'Brien 'Did Not Do A Lot Of Prep' To Play Dan Aykroyd In Saturday Night, But Jason Reitman Explained Why That's Exactly What He Wanted Him To Do

Rebel Ridge's Aaron Pierre: Where You've Seen The Actor Before

How To Watch Tulsa King Season 2 Online With Paramount Plus And Stream Every Episode From Anywhere

His Girlfriend Is Dead (Shh, Don’t Tell Her)

Share full article

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Aug. 14, 2014

Aubrey Plaza has large, intelligent eyes and a startlingly gorgeous smile — one that’s unleashed all too rarely in her role as a lovable misanthrope on “Parks and Recreation.” Sadly, playing a lusty, undead girlfriend in “Life After Beth” gives her even fewer opportunities to beam, but when she does, the whole film seems to slow down and soften.

And for an aimlessly crashing-around comedy, that’s a big deal. Reappearing not long after her funeral, Beth is blissfully unaware that she’s past her expiration date. Her parents (Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly) refuse to tell her, and her grieving boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan), will tolerate anything — even fetid breath and a tendency to gnaw on his car’s upholstery — to keep her around. As for Beth, she just wants to copulate and listen to smooth jazz.

Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.

By contrast, recent television series have proved how fertile this kind of reassimilation story can be, whether handled with the eerie poetry of Sundance TV’s “The Returned,” or with the whip-smart, working-class pragmatism of BBC America’s “In the Flesh.” In that show, the so-called Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferers made us laugh, weep and worry about all-too-real evils; Beth just makes us wish she had more reasons to smile.

LIFE AFTER BETH

Opens on Friday

Directed by Jeff Baena

1 hour 31 minutes

“Life After Beth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Twisted love and rotten sex.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Life after beth: sundance review.

Dane DeHaan plays a young man who's both elated and terrified when his dead girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) returns from the grave.

By THR Staff

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Life After Beth Sundance Film Still - H 2014

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. 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. 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 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.

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

“rape, violence, abuse”: the threats that led the toronto film festival to pull ‘russians at war’, josh gad says it was a “big mistake” using his regular voice for olaf in ‘frozen’, eva mendes reveals if she would return to acting: “who knows”, david schwimmer recalls turning down ‘men in black’: “that would have made me a movie star”, ‘mickey 17’ trailer kills robert pattinson again (and again), oscar predictions via feinberg forecast: scott’s post-venice/telluride/toronto read of the race.

Life After Beth

Review by brian eggert july 15, 2014.

Our society’s pop-culture obsession with zombies continues with Life After Beth , another entry in the sub-subgenre where a human carries on a romantic relationship with one of the living dead. There’s something inherently disgusting and unbelievable about this scenario that makes horror-comedy fans want to mine it for laughs, although it’s rarely accomplished with a satisfying outcome. Warm Bodies suggested that a young woman might fall for a zombie whose humanity slowly comes back as his love blooms around her; but the actionized, takes-itself-seriously third act of that film spoiled any hope for a believable romance. Fortunately, Fido went for a full-on satire, set in a 1950s world where post-apocalyptic zombies are used as pets and servants in Americana homes; the result was a fully formed absurdist romance between Billy Connoly’s brain-eater and Carrie-Ann Moss’ lonely suburban housewife.

Writer-director Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth is marginally more effective than Warm Bodies because it focuses on the zombie-human relationship and keeps the larger apocalyptic details as background noise. Still, the film doesn’t establish a firm set of absurdist rules; instead, there’s a hint of realism that feels inappropriate to this kind of story. Dane DeHaan plays Zach, who’s beset by grief at the loss of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). She was going to break up with him before she died of a snakebite while hiking, but he still loves her, to a fault. His parents (Paul Reiser, Cheryl Hines) are none too sympathetic about his loss, and so he takes some comfort from spending time with Beth’s parents, Maury (John C. Reilly) and Geenie (Molly Shannon). But when Beth’s parents suddenly won’t see him anymore, Zach starts snooping and sees Beth, seemingly alive and well, in their house.

Turns out Beth dug herself up one evening and appeared on their doorstep, and to keep suspicions down and onlookers away, her parents have resolved to keep her return a secret. Baena puts his own spin on the zombie rulebook here. After coming back to life, Beth looks relatively normal, talks without grunting or moaning (at first, anyway), her completion is lifelike, and her personality is retained despite some memory loss. Conveniently, she’s forgotten about wanting to break up with Zach; however, she’s plagued by some of Baena’s stranger additions to zombie mythology. Easy-listening smooth jazz soothes her sudden violent outbursts; she’s compelled to gather dirt and plaster it on the walls in the attic, where her parents are keeping her; and she’s convinced that she has to study for a test tomorrow (it’s always tomorrow, no matter how many days pass). Hilariously, human flesh isn’t on her mind at first. But Zach, who’s familiar with zombie mythology, keeps a paranoid eye on her hunger and remains fearful of becoming dinner.

While Zach wants to rekindle his relationship with Beth, her parents demand secrecy, and Baena’s overlapping, argumentative dialogue shines in these scenes and reminds us of the screwball situations from I Heart Huckabees , which Baena co-wrote with David O. Russell. But slowly, Beth’s behavior gets weirder, more like a traditional zombie, and Zach’s love for her is less a motivation than his fear of being eaten. Enter Erica (Anna Kendrick), Zach’s ditzy childhood friend who’s certain to become his rebound. When zombified Beth confronts the two, DeHaan is wonderfully awkward. He carries the movie’s emotional heft and makes a believable sad sack, while Plaza has fun in the early scenes of the disconnected Beth, but later on, she forces grunts that sound more like demonic possession. Of the supporting cast, Reilly and Shannon add the most to their traumatized, somewhat demented grieving parent roles.

Life After Beth drags on and becomes trying in the third act, when a larger zombie apocalypse takes hold of Zach’s hometown and other long-dead friends and relatives begin returning from the grave. How are these corpses not more decayed? Why are they coming back at all? It’s best not to ask too many questions when your protagonist doesn’t mind kissing, much less making love to, a resurrected (“Like Jesus,” Zach points out) corpse. Of course, in the long tradition of zombie metaphors, the whole movie stands as an allegory for dealing with the heartache of loss, be it the loss of life, or simply a bad breakup where the other party seems to become a raging monster afterward. Though not without its fair share of charms and laughs, the central notion of zombie physical romance is handled in an unbelievable way. Then again, perhaps ” unbelievable” is a poor argument against a movie where the dead return to life.

Related Titles

In Theaters

Recent Reviews

The Substance 2 Stars ☆ ☆
Speak No Evil 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Patreon Exclusive: The Front Room 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 2 Stars ☆ ☆
Close Your Eyes 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Look Into My Eyes 2.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
AfrAId 1.5 Stars ☆ ☆
Patreon Exclusive: Rope 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Good One 4 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Strange Darling 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Blink Twice 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Alien: Romulus 2.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Skincare 3 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆
Sing Sing 3.5 Stars ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Borderlands 1.5 Stars ☆ ☆

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Life after beth.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 0 Reviews
Kids Say 1 Review

Common Sense Media Review

Deadpan "romzomcom" likely to have cult appeal for teens.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 17+?

Though the violence starts slowly, and most of the killings take place off scree

When Beth comes back to life, she and Zach kiss and fondle each other (clothed)

"F--k" is heard several times, in several permutations. Also words like "c--k,"

A man shares some pot with the main character, who's probably in his early 20s.

Some Jell-O jokes early on, and Jell-O is shown. A character drives a SAAB, whic

Any Positive Content?

The main character initially tries to hang onto a fantasy but eventually realize

The characters are mainly just ordinary young people in love, with a few strange

Violence & Scariness

Though the violence starts slowly, and most of the killings take place off screen, there's quite a bit of splattered blood on furniture, walls, and on characters' faces and clothes. Some charred bodies are found. A character cuts off her fingers to feed to a zombie, and spurting blood is shown. A man shoots an old lady in the head. Zombies are shot in the head. A zombie sets fire to a beach house. Lots of tense arguing and shouting.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

When Beth comes back to life, she and Zach kiss and fondle each other (clothed) a lot. They're definitely thinking about sex and planning ways to get away so they can go at it. They manage to have sex on a playground (no nudity shown). In one scene, a naked female zombie is shown, with her naked breasts and a naked bottom on view for several seconds. The main character starts to rub a scarf that belonged to his dead girlfriend over his crotch area (clothed), but he's caught.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k" is heard several times, in several permutations. Also words like "c--k," "a--hole," "gay," "Jesus," "bitch," "s--t," "penis," and "douchebag."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A man shares some pot with the main character, who's probably in his early 20s. The main character also smokes a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Some Jell-O jokes early on, and Jell-O is shown. A character drives a SAAB, which is mentioned.

Positive Messages

The main character initially tries to hang onto a fantasy but eventually realizes that the truth must come out, no matter how painful.

Positive Role Models

The characters are mainly just ordinary young people in love, with a few strange problems. No one behaves particularly badly, nor do they behave in any extraordinary way; their behavior is mostly intended to elicit laughs.

Parents need to know that Life After Beth is a zombie comedy with some romance thrown in (aka a "romzomcom"). Zombie killings mostly take place off screen, but there's lots of blood, as well as shooting, shouting, and arguing. Language is strong, with several uses of "f--k" as well as words like "c--k" and "a--hole." Characters kiss and fondle each other, with sex definitely on their minds. They do have sex in one scene, but no nudity is shown. A zombie girl is shown naked in one scene (breasts and butt). The main character smokes pot in one scene and a cigarette in another. Zombie fans will likely want to see this, as well as any big fans of stars Aubrey Plaza or Dane DeHaan . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say
Kids say (1)

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

After going for a hike alone, Beth ( Aubrey Plaza ) dies of a snakebite. Her boyfriend, Zach ( Dane DeHaan ), is having a difficult time dealing with her loss and is spending extra time with her parents ( John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon ). One night he arrives to find that Beth is still alive ... sort of: She's a zombie. She seems normal enough, so they keep dating. But Beth soon starts acting strangely, growing more and more out of control. Worse, more zombies begin showing up. Zach has a choice. He can either continue to pretend like nothing is wrong, or he can start preparing for a zombie apocalypse.

Is It Any Good?

The directorial debut of Jeff Baena, who co-wrote 2004's brilliant (albeit polarizing) I Heart Huckabees , LIFE AFTER BETH is a terrific modern-day take on the classic "Monkey's Paw" story. It depends a great deal on sly, sustained deadpan humor and weird comic detours. Some viewers may tire of repeated jokes -- like the fact that smooth jazz music tends to calm the zombies, or the full-sized oven strapped to a zombie's back during a long sequence. But these jokes are actually timed to escalate in funniness.

Baena's real achievement is balancing the humor with a truly heartfelt central story. DeHaan does a remarkable job of playing it straight during his genuinely painful romantic conundrum, while Plaza finds new angles to her usual wry comic persona. The two make a powerful connection. The great supporting cast is also used to wonderful effect. It's unlikely that Life After Beth will catch on with a wide audience, but a handful of dedicated cult fans will adore it.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Life After Beth 's zombie violence . How much does it show and not show? How do these choices affect the tone of the movie? How did it make you feel? How would it have changed with more or less violence?

How does sex affect the story? Is it an extension of how the characters feel about each other, or is it more gratuitous?

Is the movie scary ? How does it compare to other zombie movies you've seen? How does it compare to other zombie comedies you may have seen?

What's the appeal of zombie stories? What kinds of things or ideas do they represent in our culture?

Movie Details

In theaters : August 15, 2014
On DVD or streaming : October 21, 2014
Cast : Aubrey Plaza , John C. Reilly , Dane DeHaan
Director : Jeff Baena
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Bisexual actors, Latino actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 91 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : pervasive language, some horror violence, sexual content, nudity and brief drug use
Last updated : May 4, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Shaun of the Dead

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Warm Bodies

Vampire, Werewolf, and Zombie Books

Best zombie game apps.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Life After Beth (2014)

Movie Details

Stream & watch life after beth.

Trailers & Clips

Cast & Crew

Similar Movies

Movie Reviews

Follow Moviefone

Latest trailers.

life after beth (2014)

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Life After Beth

Zach (Dane DeHaan) is devastated by the unexpected death of his girlfriend, Beth (Aubrey Plaza). But when she miraculously comes back to life, Zach takes full advantage of the opportunity to share and experience all the things he regretted not doing with her before. However, the newly returned Beth isn’t quite how he remembered her and, before long, Zach’s whole world takes a turn for the worse.

Aubrey Plaza Takes on Dirty Grandpa

Aubrey Plaza is set to play Lenore, a spring break party girl in the comedy Dirty Grandpa, starring Zac Efron and Robert De Niro.

Revenge of the Green Dragons Trailer from Producer Martin Scorsese

Revenge of the Green Dragons starring Ray Liotta will debut on DirecTV September 11 followed by a theatrical release in October.

Aubrey Plaza Returns from the Grave in 2 Life After Beth Clips

Aubrey Plaza plays the title character in Life After Beth, a zombie whose wild mood swings can be tempered with a little soft jazz.

Life After Beth Clip Brings Aubrey Plaza Back from the Dead

Dane DeHaan's Zach discovers that his girlfriend is still alive after attending her funeral in the first Life After Beth clip.

Jaimie Alexander and Wes Bentley Join Psychological Thriller Broken Vows

Wes Bentley stars as the seemingly-charming Patrick in Broken Vows, whose psychotic behavior is unleashed when a young woman, played by Jaimie Alexander, turns him down.

Life After Beth Trailer Starring Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan

The romantic comedy gets an undead twist in Life After Beth, starring Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan as a couple whose relationship finds new life, literally.

Aubrey Plaza Joins the Living Dead in 2 Life After Beth Posters

Dane DeHann is featured on a second Life After Beth character poster that introduces his character Zach, a young man who decided to embrace the return of his recently deceased girlfriend.

Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick Team for Mr. Right

Paco Cabezas is directing this Max Landis-scripted comedy about a young woman who falls for a reformed hitman.

Zombie Comedy Life After Beth Moves to A24

The zombie movie will air on DirecTV 30 days before its theatrical release. Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza star in the Sundance comedy.

Movies & TV
Big on the Internet
About Us & Contact

Zombie Comedy Life After Beth Is Partially Dead on Arrival

Who’s excited to see that movie where Aubrey Plaza’s a zombie and Dane DeHaan is her human boyfriend? Anna Kendrick is there! And John C’ Reilly! Molly Shannon! Matthew Gray Gubler! Get excited! No, not that excited. Moderately excited. Somewhat enthused. With a tinge of boredom.

Life After Beth is one of those movies that suffers from a trailer that almost completely misrepresents it. Watch that 1:49 amuse-bouche and you’ll get the sense of Life After Beth as a kooky and funny, if undoubtedly twisted, satire of the zombie genre. The clip (same link as the trailer) that’s been circulating around since it made its debut at Sundance features John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon showing why they’re comedy masters, and Dane DeHaan showing why someone needs to start casting him in roles that are lighter than his typical “I-am-so-intense-and-serious, look-at-my-piercing-eyes-and-be-afriad” fare. God knows he’s awesome at them, but the man has comedic chops as well.

And Life After Beth is a funny film—a highlight is Matthew Gray Gubler as Zach’s rent-a-cop older brother—but it’s also a horror film and a romantic drama. Tonally, it’s… odd. It’s basically a zombie apocalypse movie where the zombie apocalypse gets going realllllly sllllowwwwly , giving you time to see the still-living characters—primarily Beth’s parents and Zach—react to their loved ones’… er, changed circumstances. I can see why the marketing team decided to play up the comedy in the trailers, because who doesn’t like Aubrey Plaza being funny? But I can’t help but feel they really did the film a disservice, because going in expecting one thing and getting another is always going to throw you off.

Sometimes a film can recover from that (see: Snowpiercer ). Unfortunately, Life After Beth was not one of them, because what it is is not particularly great. The “zombie apocalypse in suburbia” elements really worked for me, as did some of the worldbuilding (zombies being calmed down by smooth jazz is brilliant ), but they were elements that weren’t expanded on all that much. Instead, the majority of the screen time is devoted to the relationship between Beth and Zach, and frankly, I don’t think that was enough to stretch out over a whole film.

We get the sense of it pretty early on—they were having relationship troubles, Beth died, Zach felt guilty, now she’s back but kind of not, hooray!—and then a good chunk of the middle of the film is just stuff we already know being belabored while more interesting things, things I wanted to know more about ( smooth jazz ), happened in the background.

Beth and Zach: The Short Film —great. Suburban Zombie Apocalypse: The Horror/Comedy Film With a Heart —also great. Life After Beth —ehhhhh. It lurches around like a zombie on the hunt for tasty, tasty brains.

This is the first film from writer/director Jeff Baena, who previously wrote I Heart Huckabees. I look forward to what he does next, because Life After Beth , for all that it’s stuck in the undead limbo between good and bad, displays a real “fuck you” attitude toward genre conventions that I am always on-board for. As first-time films go, it’s not awful. It’s a Netflixer. But it’s not as good as it looks.

That Parks & Rec cameo was pretty fun, though. No, I won’t tell you who it is.

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter , Facebook , Tumblr , Pinterest , & Google + ?

September 17, 2024

Winnipeg 20° C , Partly cloudy

Full Forecast

Advertising Contact
Send a Letter to the Editor
Staff biographies
Submit a News Tip
Subscribe to Newsletters
Notifications
Create Account
Compact View
About the E-Edition
Winnipeg Free Press
Community Review East
Community Review West
All Arts & Life
Celebrities
Environment
Food & Drink
Life & Style
Science & Technology
All Business
Agriculture
Personal Finance
Manitoba’s Top Employers
All Opinion
Editorial Cartoon
Letters to the Editor
Auto Racing
Blue Bombers
High School
Horse Racing
Winnipeg Jets
Manitoba Open
Reader Bridge
Free Press 101: How we practise journalism
Advertising
Carrier Positions & Retailer Requests
FP Newspapers Inc.
Internships
Job Opportunities
Local Journalism Initiative
Retail Locations
Staff Biographies
Terms and Conditions
Canada Sports Betting
Online Casinos Canada
Ontario Betting
Responsible Gaming
All Free Press Community Review News
East Edition
West Edition
Classifieds
All FP Features
Business Hub
Drink & Dine
Health & Wellness
Whiskers & Wings
Sponsored Articles
Property Listings
Featured News
Renovation and design
Resale homes
Newsletters
Niigaan and the Lone Ranger
Photo and Book store
Become a Patron
Privacy Policy

Quick Links

Publications
Sponsored Content
Employee Code of Conduct Policy
Supplier Code of Conduct Policy
Report on Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains

Ways to support us

Pay it Forward program
Support Faith coverage
Support Arts coverage

Replica E-Edition

Arts & Life

Manitoba Moose
Photo Galleries

Canstar Community news

All Betting
Ontario Sports Betting
Online Casinos Ontario
Sports Betting Picks

Notification Settings

This browser doesn't support push notifications at the moment. Check browsers features, update your browser or try to use one from the list of recommended to manage your notifications settings:

Firefox (27+)
Google Chrome (30+)
Safari ( MacOS 13+ with browser 16.1+ and iOS 16.4+ ) / Note make sure Push API support enabled under Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features
Microsoft Edge

If you wish to manage your notification settings from this browser you will need to update your browser's settings for this site. Just click button below and allow notifications for this site

Note Safari 16.4+ working on iOS devices also need this site app to be installed at device's Home Screen for Push Notifications to work

Notifications are blocked for this site. If you wish to manage your notification settings from this browser you will need to update your browser's settings. Usually you'd need to click on site options icon to the left of address bar and change notifications preferences/permissions from there

Breaking News

Urgent and important stories

Movie Review: Coon, Olsen and Lyonne await a father’s death in ‘His Three Daughters’

Advertise with us

Death isn’t like it is in the movies, a character explains in “ His Three Daughters. ” Elizabeth Olsen’s Christina is telling her sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), a story about their father, who became particularly agitated one evening while watching a movie on television in the aftermath of his wife’s passing.

Read this article for free:

Already have an account? Log in here »

To continue reading, please subscribe:

Monthly Digital Subscription

$19 $0 for the first 4 weeks *

Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
Access News Break, our award-winning app
Play interactive puzzles

*No charge for 4 weeks then billed as $19 every four weeks (new subscribers and qualified returning subscribers only). Cancel anytime.

Read unlimited articles for free today:

It’s not exactly a fun memory, or present, for any of them. This is, after all, also a movie about death.

The three women have gathered in their father’s small New York apartment for his final days. He’s barely conscious, confined to a room that they take shifts monitoring as they wait out this agonizingly unspecific clock. But even absent the stresses of hospice, tensions would be high for Christina, Katie and Rachel, estranged and almost strangers who are about to lose the one thread still binding them. Taken together, it’s a pressure cooker and a wonderful showcase for three talented actors.

This image released by Netflix shows Natasha Lyonne, left, and Elizabeth Olsen in a scene from

Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has scripted and filmed “His Three Daughters,” streaming Friday on Netflix, like a play. The dialogue often sounds more scripted than conversational (except for Lyonne, who makes everything sound her own); the locations are confined essentially to a handful of rooms in the apartment, with the communal courtyard providing the tiniest bit of breathing room.

Jacobs drops the audience into the middle of things, dolling out background and information slowly and purposefully. Coon’s Katie gets the first word, a monologue really, about the state of things as she sees it and how this is going to work. She’s the eldest, a type-A ball of anxiety, the mother of a difficult teenage daughter and the type of person who can barely conceal either disappointment or deep resentment. Katie also lives in Brooklyn, not far from her father, but rarely ever visited. Caretaking duties were left to Lyonne’s Rachel, an unemployed stoner who never left home, likes to bet on football games and is poised to inherit the apartment – to the not-so-subtle resentment of her sisters. The youngest is Christina, a head-in-the-clouds, conflict averse yogi and Grateful Dead follower who lives across the country and has had to leave her 3-year-old for the first time.

Jacobs is unafraid of allowing both drama and humor to coexist, to seep into moments unexpectedly. There is an undeniable absurdity to the act of writing an obituary for a loved one in a fraught time like hospice that actually captures a life and a person and doesn’t sound like a laundry list of biographical facts and positive attributes. Add to that the fact that Katie is also frantically trying to get a medical professional to the apartment to witness a DNR order. The women are torn in premature grief, wanting him to stay alive but also go quickly.

They’re all richly drawn and perfectly mysterious too, even to themselves; Jacobs too smart and attuned to how humans are to give anyone a simple, straightforward explanation. Everyone is making assumptions about others — many of them are wrong, or, at the very least misguided. Coon, with her booming, theatrical voice, is particularly suited playing this slightly terrifying, massively judgmental perfectionist. Lyonne, so good at cool deflection, gets to use that otherworldliness to hit a different kind of note: quiet heartbreak. And Olsen, playing a character, really shines in her non-verbal choices: A reaction, a moment alone that she doesn’t know is being observed. It won’t be surprising if any or all get some recognition this awards season (unfortunately in a system that is uniquely ill-equipped to fete small ensembles with three leads).

There are some movies that die quiet deaths on streaming-first (this did receive a bit of a theatrical run), but “His Three Daughters” is one that seems right on Netflix just for its ability to reach a larger audience than it would stand a chance to at the multiplex. It’s never not riveting watching it all unfold, even with the temptation of the phone nearby. Whether you make it a solo viewing experience or a group one might have everything to do with your own relationship with family members.

And to that initial indictment about movies not getting death right? It’s still probably true. But movies like “His Three Daughters” might help us all make a little bit more sense of the inevitable.

“His Three Daughters,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language and drug use.” Running time: 101 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Advertisement Advertise With Us

Featured Local Savings

COMMENTS

Life After Beth movie review & film summary (2014)
91 minutes ‧ R ‧ 2014. Christy Lemire. August 15, 2014. 4 min read. Life After Beth. "Life After Beth" gets into the well-tread zombie-comedy territory in a clever and inspired way. Then it doesn't get out of it nearly so skillfully. The feature debut from writer-director Jeff Baena, who co-wrote the 2004 existential comedy " I ...
Life After Beth
Life After Beth. A guy (Dane DeHaan) discovers that his girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) has returned from the dead, but his joy turns to horror as she slowly undergoes a horrible transformation. Rent ...
Life After Beth
Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that's better before the innards hit the fan, when it's a sad teen-breakup drama with a streak of the supernatural. Dane DeHaan ...
Life After Beth
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2019. Abbie Bernstein Assignment X. Life After Beth is well-made, has some good moments and is worth seeing for Reilly alone. It just doesn't fully ...
Life After Beth (2014)
Life After Beth: Directed by Jeff Baena. With Aubrey Plaza, Dane DeHaan, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon. A young man's recently deceased girlfriend mysteriously returns from the dead, but he slowly realizes she is not the way he remembered her.
Life After Beth Review
A coarse comedy with aspirations of artfulness, the film rambles like the worst kind of improv sketch, until Aubrey Plaza blows it open with her idiosyncratic combo of Evil Ash-meets-Stepford Wife ...
Life After Beth
Mixed or Average Based on 30 Critic Reviews. 50. 30% Positive 9 Reviews. 57% Mixed 17 Reviews. 13% Negative 4 Reviews. ... Life after beth is a somewhat re-enacted story but it is very entertaining and has very committed performances by the two protagonists. ... Life After Beth is not your typical romance movie nor it is your typical zombie ...
Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)
You can say this about Life After Beth, the indie zombie romantic comedy (zom-rom-com?) by first time director, Jeff Baena: Aubrey Plaza (2012's "Safety Not Guaranteed") makes for a great zombie. With her deadpan delivery and soulless eyes, she doesn't have to do much to look and act like the dead reawakened. Don't get me wrong, this is actually a good thing, as Dane DeHaan (2014's ...
Life After Beth Review
Life After Beth Review. Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza find out if love and zombiehood mix in this dark horror comedy. Read our review! ... Movies EIFF 2014: Life After Beth review July 11, 2014 ...
Life After Beth Review
15. Original Title: Life After Beth. Jeff Baena's deadpan domestic zombie apocalypse goes out of its way not to actually articulate any rules or reasons for its own idiosyncratic outbreak. There ...
Life After Beth
Life After Beth is a 2014 American zombie comedy film written and directed by Jeff Baena. ... Life After Beth received mixed reviews. ... Brian Eggert of Deep Focus Review wrote, "Of course, in the long tradition of zombie metaphors, the whole movie stands as an allegory for dealing with the heartache of loss, be it the loss of life, or simply ...
Life After Beth Movie Review
Life After Beth Movie Review. Is this zom-rom-com worth your while? By Nick Venable | Updated 9 seconds ago. Life After Beth came out at a weird time. It takes a bright mind to bring new life to the zombie film these days, and even more so for the sub-genre of romantic zombie horror/comedies. Not because the subject matter is extremely difficult or anything; there just happens to be a dearth ...
Life After Beth Review
Check out Matt Donato's review of Life After Beth, a zombie rom-com starring Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan. ... Life After Beth is much more an analysis of relationships than squeamish horror movie ...
Life After Beth (2014) Movie Review from Eye for Film
It's a ridiculous cast, full of familiar faces, but it's that very familiarity that's Life After Beth's biggest weakness. Using genre to explore relationships isn't anything new - at Edinburgh's 2014 there are at least two: Coherence , which is to love stories involving alternate realities what a guillotine is to a sliding door, and The ...
Life After Beth
Life After Beth is content to meander a bit throughout its runtime, ditching story momentum in favor of its overqualified cast. Plaza is very funny as the cursed Beth, and you forgive the film's ...
'Life After Beth,' a Zombie Rom-Com
Directed by Jeff Baena. Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Romance. R. 1h 29m. By Jeannette Catsoulis. Aug. 14, 2014. Aubrey Plaza has large, intelligent eyes and a startlingly gorgeous smile — one that ...
Life After Beth: Sundance Review
Life After Beth: Sundance Review. Dane DeHaan plays a young man who's both elated and terrified when his dead girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) returns from the grave. If Cooties is Sundance 2014 's ...
Life After Beth
Our society's pop-culture obsession with zombies continues with Life After Beth, another entry in the sub-subgenre where a human carries on a romantic relationship with one of the living dead.There's something inherently disgusting and unbelievable about this scenario that makes horror-comedy fans want to mine it for laughs, although it's rarely accomplished with a satisfying outcome.
'Life After Beth' movie review: Is she a zombie, or is she Jesus?
Written and directed by Jeff Baena — who co-wrote David O. Russell's witty, existential detective movie "I Heart Huckabees" — "Life After Beth" is an aimless, slight and ultimately off-putting ...
Life After Beth Movie Review
Our review: Parents say Not yet rated Rate movie. Kids say (1 ): The directorial debut of Jeff Baena, who co-wrote 2004's brilliant (albeit polarizing) I Heart Huckabees, LIFE AFTER BETH is a terrific modern-day take on the classic "Monkey's Paw" story. It depends a great deal on sly, sustained deadpan humor and weird comic detours.
Life After Beth (2014)
Watch on Apple iTunes. R 1 hr 30 min Jul 15th, 2014 Horror, Comedy, Romance. Zach is devastated by the unexpected death of his girlfriend, Beth. When she mysteriously returns, he gets a second ...
life after beth (2014)
Zach (Dane DeHaan) is devastated by the unexpected death of his girlfriend, Beth (Aubrey Plaza). But when she miraculously comes back to life, Zach takes full advantage of the opportunity to share ...
Movie Review: Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHann's Life After Beth
Life After Beth is one of those movies that suffers from a trailer that almost completely misrepresents it. Watch that 1:49 amuse-bouche and you'll get the sense of Life After Beth as a kooky ...
Movie Review: Coon, Olsen and Lyonne await a father's death in 'His
Death isn't like it is in the movies, a character explains in " His Three Daughters. " Elizabeth Olsen's Christina is telling her sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne ...

Life After Beth

Christy Lemire

Director of Photography

Transformers One

American Crime Story: Aaron Hernandez

Speak No Evil (2024)

Saturday Night

The Killer’s Game

Girls Will Be Girls

The 4:30 Movie

Sweetheart Deal

TIFF 2024: Table of Contents

TIFF 2024: Village Keeper, 40 Acres, Flow

TIFF 2024: The Shadow Strays, Friendship, The Shrouds

TIFF 2024: Babygirl, All We Imagine as Light, Queer

Life After Beth Is a Zombie Comedy That Coasts on Its Stars’ Charms Before Deciding to Devour Itself

Most Viewed Stories

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

Sign In To Continue Reading

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Life After Beth Reviews

Life After Beth

Top cast 30

More like this

Did you know

User reviews 97

Technical specs

Related news

More to explore

Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)

'Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)' have 6 comments

Life After Beth Review

Life After Beth Review

Life After Beth Movie Review

Sitcom Star Killed Off Because He Dissed His TV Wife

Han Solo Never Really Died In Star Wars

Origin Of Earth’s Largest Extinction Event Discovered

Long-Awaited DC Sequel Will Be Hard R-Rated Horrorfest

City-Killer Asteroid On Track To Impact Earth

Forget Marvel, You Can Stream Most Of Scarlett Johansson’s Best Movies Without Disney+

The Best Adam Sandler Movies Ranked From Good To Great

It Cast: What Happened To Them After Their Stephen King Movie

The Best Jamie Foxx Movies To Stream Right Now

X-Men Star Embarrassed Himself In Front Of Celebrity Crush

The Best Top Gun Knock Off Launched Its Own Wildly Successful Franchise

Tom Cruise Olympic Stunt Cost Is Unbelievable

Hazardous Asteroid Passes Dangerously Close To Earth

Life After Beth Review

Eye For Film >> Movies >> Life After Beth (2014) Film Review

Life After Beth

Most Popular

His Girlfriend Is Dead (Shh, Don’t Tell Her)

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Related Stories

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Life After Beth

Related Titles

Recent Reviews

Recent Articles

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers