“Hereafter” follows three storylines involving a woman who recently had a near-death experience, a medium who can communicate with the dead and a young boy coping with the loss of his twin brother.
We begin with Marie (Cecile De France) who is on vacation with her lover at a resort when it is hit by a tsunami. Marie gets caught up in the wave and is soon brought back to life after briefly witnessing the hereafter. She returns to her life in Paris unable to come to terms with her experience and takes time off work to recover. During her time off, she writes a book about life after death.

Next we meet George (Matt Damon) who can touch somebody’s hand and immediately make contact with the people in their lives who are in the hereafter. George’s brother (Jay Mohr) wants to exploit George’s gift for financial gain, but George sees it instead as a curse and would rather live a life of obscurity. Completing the trio of stories we have Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren). When Jason is killed, Marcus is left unable to cope without his twin brother. He seeks out advice from a number of sources on life-after-death — discovering each to be a fraud — before reading about George on the internet.

The movie concludes with each of these three stories converging as our three main characters unwittingly come together one fateful day in London. “Hereafter” is every bit as ponderous as you’d expect from a film about death and the afterlife. In the hands of a superlative director like Clint Eastwood, it’s also very watchable.