Hereafter

It could have been a routine spook story, but it’s directed by Clint Eastwood, and you know he wouldn’t waste his time with any Amityville Horror bullshit. Matt Damon is a man who seems to be able to communicate with the dead. Not in any table-knocking dim room with sheets hung over helium balloons, but just by taking someone’s hand. And he hates it. He doesn’t want to do it, despite the fact that his brother wants to make a lot of money at it, as he certainly could. Cécile De France is a rational woman who has survived a near-death experience (in the Indonesian tsunami, and the whole movie would be worth seeing just for that SFX sequence), and wants some answers. Do we survive after death? There is a boy whose identical twin brother was killed in an accident, and he wants to communicate with him. Eastwood offers no answers, as well he shouldn’t, and nothing Damon does is impossible simply using, possibly unconsciously, standard cold reading techniques that have been around for centuries. I liked it.