Brain-dead 'After.Life' preachy, predictable

If Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's dullingly un-horrific and pseudo-enlightening "After.Life" ever becomes a cult movie, it will undoubtedly be one for necrophiliacs.

After all, the breathtaking Christina Ricci appears in this movie without a stitch, except for the one on her forehead to repair a wicked gash.

She lies down and walks around naked in a chilly morgue looking like a bleached cadaver with her pale skin, dilated belladonna pupils and blood-red lipstick.

As dead women go, she's a sexual fantasy right out of an R-rated version of Tim Burton's "The Corpse Bride."

Ricci plays Anna, a hot, young elementary schoolteacher in a relationship with a local lawyer named Paul (Justin Long). One night, she has a fight with Paul, then drives away in a huff.

The next thing she knows, she wakes up on a slab in an undertaker's office. She has no heartbeat. No body heat.

"I'm not dead!" Anna shouts.

"You all say the same thing," Eliot Deacon, the irritable funeral director, replies.

If "After.Life" teaches us anything, it's that being a clairvoyant funeral director is just about the hardest job in the world of the living.

Deacon, played by Liam Neeson, not only has to clean the bodies, embalm them, dress them and make them up for their funerals, but he also has to convince the dead people they really are dead.

Sometimes he has to psychoanalyze them to make them confront their problems, and ease them on down the road, so to speak.

At least that's what he does with Anna, who keeps trying to escape from the morgue and reunite with Paul.

It's never really clear, at least through most of "After.Life," if Anna is really dead, or if Deacon is a devilish deceiver who likes to snip off Anna's clothes and engage her in philosophical exchanges on what living really means.

"Why do we die?" Anna asks. Deacon replies, "To make life important."

He presses Anna to come clean with what she wanted in life more than anything.

"I wanted to love, but I was too scared!" Anna admits.

"You all say you're scared of death!" Deacon rails. "The truth is, you're all scared of life!"

Gee, thanks, Deacon. That's a real help for a dead woman.

While Deacon prepares a couple of other funerals in his small Midwestern town -- it's never identified, but a car license plate says Ohio -- Paul freaks out, suspecting that somehow Anna is still alive.

His suspicions are confirmed when little Jack (Chandler Canterbury), one of Anna's students, reports that he saw Anna in a red dress standing next to a window at Deacon's gothic, stone-constructed funeral home.

Little Jack resembles Damien the Antichrist from "The Omen," but is actually closer to Danny, the clairvoyant kid from "The Shining." At least up to the moment he buries a baby chick alive.

Shot in a concentrated 25 days, "After.Life" is quirky and unpredictable enough to keep us off-balance, but it doesn't take long before the pretentious screenplay (from the director, Paul Vosloo and Jakub Korolczuk) begins to unravel with inadvertently comic consequences.

Take the scene where Anna finally sees herself in a mirror for the first time since her accident.

"Why do I look like a corpse?" Anna asks. Hmmm.

She argues with Deacon, like someone with a terminal illness bargaining with death.

"You're a corpse, Anna," Deacon barks. "Your opinions don't matter anymore!"

Wojtowicz-Vosloo obviously intended "After.Life" to be a thoughtful meditation on life and death.

Instead, it becomes a closer examination of the goose bumps all over Anna's corporeal assets.

"After.Life"Rating: #9733;Starring: Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, Justin LongDirected by: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-VoslooOther: An Anchor Bay Releasing release. Rated R for language, nudity and sexual situations. 99 minutes