The Creepiest Bit

As ever, it's fun to see the gap between viewers who enjoy visual subtlety and those who really detest it. Me, I'm a fan of both slow film artistry and action flicks, and found this odd movie engrossing. It's a skillful balance of documentary style with intensely personal drama, of verbal information and non-verbal revelation: the actors' faces tell so much about how each is dealing with the complicated adjustment to having their dead loved ones back among them. You can't sit back and let it run by; you have to be attentive, as if you're a friend of each family. The dad no longer love or think. They are only trapped in their old context.

But the creepiest character for me is the doctor, keeping such a voyeuristic watch over Rachel in relation to her dead Mathieu. He seems at first to be both scientifically curious and humanly caring, but he both films them making love -- the dead and the living-- and goes on watching after he has turned off his camera. Really, he becomes a sly stalker, an emotional vampire, and I'm glad he is not able to witness Rachel's heartbreaking last moment with Mathieu.

Thanks to the viewer who suggested the dividing line between the dead whose families clung to them and the dead whose families let them go. That explained for me the contrast between the little boy's dad and mom, and why the latter seemed no longer attached to her child. It also explains the old woman Martha's tenderness in encouraging her husband to join her in death as his heart gave out, though she never invited him before.

Hope to catch the apparently less effective Japanese 2002 film "Yomigaeri" too, someday.

While there are times I think it would be great to have my dead loved ones back for a weekend, this thoughtful take on the notion reminds me that there is no real return imaginable from the final change. I admire and appreciate this film on every count.