Review of After Last Season (2009) by John S — 09 Oct 2015

At least since Edweard Muybridge's original experiments with motion photography, no other combination of sound and/or colors in the history of moving images has ever succeeded so thoroughly at making the incorrect aesthetic and technical decision at literally every possible juncture as this film does.

It is so erroneous that at least once every 100 frames, this film raises fundamental questions about the cinematic arts that no scholar at any university anywhere in the world would ever have though to ask, had it not come into existence. If a film-school graduate set out to deliberately make the most incomprehensibly wrong film s/he could possibly create, that person would still fail miserably to come anywhere near the frequency and degree of genuinely mind-bending levels of wrongness that occur in this film. I'm not joking, It is seriously astounding that a person with no former film-school training was able to actually create this artwork.

Time, lighting, basic human relationships, music, storytelling, visual composition, and almost everything else about both movies and our physical and emotional selves in some form or another is somehow mysteriously queried by this film. Not since Kuleshov's original experiments with the manner in which the human brain derives physical and spatial relationships from the combination of different film sequences has an editor destroyed the entire concept of cinematic geography in such a stomach-churning manner.

If Salvador Dali could see this film, he would demand a more coherent plot structure. If you could show it to Ingmar Bergman he would watch the entire thing in silent awe and then slap you in the face and walk away without ever uttering a word. If you could show it to Akira Kurosawa he too would watch the entire thing in silent awe, then watch it a second time, then slap you, and then commit ritual suicide also all without ever uttering a word,.

This film came out on June 9, 2009, kicking off what is sometimes referred to as the "Summer of Death" due to the large numbers of celebrities and high-profile persons who passed away during that time period. This is not a coincidence.

5 Stars. Absolute must-see.