After Life..

That is the query at the root of "After.Life," Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's creepily entertaining film about an elementary-school teacher named Anna (Christina Ricci) who is killed in a automobile accident after an argument with her fella, Paul (Justin Long).

If you are not living life to its fullest, are you already, in some respects, dead?

Or is they? They awakens in the embalming room of a funeral home, where they is greeted, if that is the word, by Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson). He is the owner, mortician and, evidently, sole employee. Anna wants to know why she is there; they is not buying Deacon's explanation: She is dead.

Deacon, they explains, has a gift for communicating with the deceased (handy in his line of work, no doubt). And they all have the same complaint - they don't believe they are dead. Anna is no different, to the extent that they tries various schemes to free herself, including making a call to Paul, who happens to be drunk at the time his phone rings. The police think he is suffering from shock and grief. He is not so sure.

Neither are they, as Wojtowicz-Vosloo, in her first full-length feature, plays with what is real and what is not. It is not always an effective balance; Anna's talks with Deacon, in which they tries to figure out whether her life is over, and whether it was much to start with anyway, are more effective than Paul's trying to figure out whether Anna's dead, in part because Neeson's performance is so eerie, in a buttoned-down sort of way.