A24 Film No. 11: Life After Beth (2014)

After a run of films dealing with identity, decisions, and morality, we return to A24 movies with young protagonists in their late teens to early twenties, this time adopting a horror-comedy tone and using zombies and the mysteries of life after death to explore the complexities of relationships and the process of mourning and grieving. Directed and written by Jeff Baena, Life After Beth works more as a film about relationships than as a traditional zombie movie; however, its horror elements enhance the comedic tone while also revealing the different dimensions of trauma and the experience of dealing with the death of a loved one. The story centers on Zach (Dane DeHaan), a 21-year-old who is back home from college and has just lost his girlfriend, Beth (Aubrey Plaza), who tragically died from a snake bite while hiking alone. The film begins with Zach going to the funeral and starting to process his grief and the trauma of losing Beth, wishing he had had time to say the things he never said to her, and maybe work on the issues they were having in the time before her death.

I’m not sure if Baena has actually said this (I could not find an interview or an official source), but some articles about the film point out the inspiration of Life After Beth in the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus grieves the death of his lover and wishes to bring her back from the dead. Beth even shares Eurydice's death by snakebite, and Zach resembles Orpheus as a musician (he will use music to express himself to Beth and to calm her down). In the myth, the protagonist descends to the underworld to find his lover and bring her back, but in Life After Beth, Baena seems to invert the situation, bringing the underworld to Zach, with Beth returning to life as a zombie.

Beth's return elicits two reactions that reveal how people deal with grief. On the one hand, Beth’s parents, Maury and Geenie, are suspended in denial. They are so happy that their daughter is back, they don’t want to question why it is happening or her odd behavior during this “return.” They just want to keep the illusion that everything is like before the tragic passing of their daughter a week earlier. Geenie, who previously regretted not taking more pictures, now captures every moment. Maury does everything he can to protect her from learning that she had died and to keep her at home. On the other hand, Zach is in a state of dissociation; he cannot fully process the return of Beth while still carrying the trauma he was already going through. While at first he seems to follow Maury and Geenie’s approach to this “new” Beth, he soon realizes she needs to know, and that something strange is going on. In the meantime, Beth is in the dark about what happened to her and what is happening around her.

Going back to the Eurydice myth, Zach does not literally “look back” at Beth (as Orpheus does in the myth, ultimately condemning Eurydice to remain eternally in the underworld), but he eventually sees “beyond” and understands that the body that walks and talks is no longer his girlfriend, and that he has lost her forever (now for a second time).

Zombies with… emotions?

This is not a traditional zombie movie in many ways, and even Baena has said it's more of a relationship movie than a zombie one. The zombie apocalypse begins very slowly, as the first couple of zombies we see, including Beth, do not show the decomposed bodies and aggressive “brain-eating” behavior we have seen in other films. Beth even shows emotions, remembering her love for Zach and stating that she wants to be with him forever. As the movie goes on, we see her slowly decompose and become more aggressive when triggered, yet she always remembers her love for Zach (or that she is supposed to love him).

Beth comes back to the life she remembers (just like the other zombies who begin to appear as the story goes on, such as the previous owners of Zach’s house, who return directly from their graves, or the woman who asks if there is still a car wash where there is now an apartment complex). Perhaps that is why she shows emotions and chooses Zach every time. That is what she remembers.

While there is violence and an apocalyptic feel in the third act of the movie, there is an “emotional” violence throughout the entire film that feels stronger than the violence against the people who are being murdered. That violence is Zach’s illusion that he has his girlfriend back—what he was wishing for—while realizing that this is what is destroying his life (literally). The truly “monstrous” element is not the physical appearance of zombie Beth, but the emotional continuity that suggests she still loves Zach, in a distorted way that produces uncanny sensations and ultimately unsettles him.

Mourning as a personal apocalypse

Beth came back to life because Zach was unable to cope and let go, entering into a self-destructive state, represented in the zombie invasion. Only once he is able to realize how deep he is into the pain and the violence he is inflicting to himself, he is able to act and move on. 

We can even read this zombie apocalypse on a deeper level as what Trauma Studies scholar Cathy Caruth (inspired by Freud) calls the return of the repressed. This trauma that was not properly processed and is starting to consume Zach, is coming back in a distorted form in the shape of monsters. Following Caruth, the trauma is not something that is experienced fully in the moment (learning about the death or even the funeral), but something that comes back in waves over and over again. Beth’s return echoes this, and her zombie state is the recurrence of the trauma that Zach still needs to deal with.  As a result, the whole zombie apocalypse feels more like a metaphor for Zach’s grief. The biggest indication of that is that the “apocalypse” ends when (spoiler) he kills zombie Beth with a shot to her head. Right after that, a national broadcast announces that the zombies have stopped and that things are returning to normal. We see him going to her grave (one more time), and leaving in the car with his mom and a friend whom he invites to dinner. He is finally processing the trauma and going back to having a life of his own.