AFTER SHE DIED

Australia, 2022, 101 minutes, Colour.

Liliana de la Rosa, Vanessa Madrid, Paul Talbot, Barbara Bingham, Adam Golledge, Greg Poppeltin, Noah Fowler.

Directed by Jack Dignan.

A good choice for an ominous title. This is a very small-budget Australian film (although, with the stylish cinematography, it doesn’t seem like this).

For a long time, there has been great popularity for gory horror films. But, more recently, there has been something of a shift to dramas of menace, the atmosphere of the eerie, certainly some horror touches, gory moments that fit into the developing plot – and, of course, a part of the climax and the finale. After She Died is in this vein. It has been written and directed by Jack Dignan his previous work included shorts as well as special effects in such films as Thor, Love and Thunder.

The film starts quietly enough, mother and daughter (interestingly, Hispanic background and communicating sometimes in Spanish, with subtitles). Great affection between mother and daughter. Father somewhat in the background. And, then, without explanation, although the scene between mother and daughter did seem like something of a farewell, the mother dies, is buried.

Jen, the daughter is played by Liliana de la Rosa. The mother is played by Vanessa Madrid. Quite some acting demands will be made on both actresses as the increasingly eerie plot develops.

Jen, teenager, parties, friends, studies, upset at quarrels between father and mother, has to deal with her mother’s death. But, more, her father almost immediately finding a new girlfriend who is, eerily again, very much like her mother. It has quite an effect on Jan, sometimes acting normally at meals, at other times becoming more and more paranoid. And this involves her friend Louis, supportive but also raising more and more questions.

There is her friend Cameron, life of the party, ambitions, but more lately becoming quieter, at home, a touch zombie-like, and her mysterious mother.

So, the question: what happened to the mother after she died? Visits to the cemetery. Digging up graves. Excursion into the woods and the discovery of a hooded and masked character (his dialogue is difficult to pick up), Louis nicknaming him the Sheep Man, with the power to resuscitate the dead. Even her father goes into the woods to encounter the Sheep Man and the mystery of dying and life after death.

The new mother, Florence, Vanessa Madrid doing a variation on her first appearance as the mother, becomes more smilingly sinister, seemingly normal, fostering Jen, yet interfering, and behaving in stranger and stranger ways.

So, what is left, but a grand finale, confrontation between mother and daughter, the fate of the father, and some horror blood, gore and death.

It will be interesting to see the next film with the imagination of Jack Dignan.