The question of life after death is one of humanity's most complex and unanswerable. Everyone questions the possibility and has their own concept of what the afterlife may be, but cinema gives audiences the wonderful opportunity to see these visions realized and made concrete.
From breezy comedies to somber meditations on the nature of existence itself, the depictions of the afterlife on film are as diverse as stars in the sky. Below are ten of the best.
Heaven Can Wait (1943)
When rich womanizer Henry van Cleve (Don Ameche) es away and finds himself at the gates of Hell, he's resigned to his fate. Satan (Laird Cregar), however, isn't so sure that Henry did enough evil in his life to warrant eternal damnation. Henry recounts the story of his life to Old Scratch in an attempt to convince him that he's up to snuff.
The sole technicolor feature from urbane comedy master Ernst Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait is equal parts hilarious and poignant, enduring as a classic portrait of the afterlife.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
David Niven (The Pink Panther) stars alongside Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire) as a downed, WWII British Air Force pilot and the Allied radio operator he falls for in his final moments of life, stopping death in its tracks. When a dandyish supernatural messenger (Marius Goring) turns up to bring the pilot into the nether realm, he must go before a heavenly tribunal to argue why he deserves his place in the world of the living.
Ranked 90th in Sight & Sound's most recent critics poll of the greatest films of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's luxuriant fantasy spoke to a world still hurting from the loss of life during the second world war, but its story about love's power to radiate through the rigid boundaries between life and death has endeared it to generations since.
Orphée (1950)
The poet Orphée finds himself in danger when a fight breaks out at the Café des Poètes in Paris. In the scuffle, fellow poet Cègeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed and a mysterious woman (María Casares) insists on shuttling Orphée and the corpse away in her car. But this is no ordinary Rolls-Royce, and Orphée finds himself in the land of the dead.
From French renaissance man and dreammaker Jean Cocteau (La Belle et la Bête), this "modern" retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is the ultimate display of Cocteau's unmatched talent for in-camera magic and cinematic poeticism.
Jigoku (1960)
After running down a yakuza and fleeing the scene, Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) and his roommate Tamura (Yōichi Numata) set off a chain of events that will send the two men and everyone they're connected with to the depths of Hell. Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa's horror classic uses this setup as a launchpad into a finale as influential as it is terrifying. Bathed in primary colors and packed with some of the most unforgettable imagery in horror history, Jigoku brings a buddhist vision of the underworld to the screen in stylish, frightening fashion.
Beetlejuice (1988)
When they die in a freak car accident, Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) find their immortal souls tied to their country house. Unable to leave, the Maitland ghosts are at-a-loss when the infuriating and tasteless Deetzes (Catherin O'Hara, Jeffrey Jones, Winona Ryder) move in. Hoping to drive the intruders away, Barbara and Adam summon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a prankish spirit who may have dark motivations of his own.
The film that would kick director Tim Burton's career into high gear, Beetlejuice showed studio execs that he was the right fit for 1989's Batman, but remains one of his most popular films. Its vision of life after death is both hysterical and ghoulish with visionary effects, colorful characters, and a deservedly iconic performance of Harry Belafonte's "The Banana Boat Song" to top it al off.
Defending Your Life (1991)
Writer/director Albert Brooks stars as Daniel Miller, a cranky advertising exec who dies only to find himself in Judgement City: an aggressively pleasant purgatory where all the recently deceased must defend their actions on earth if they want to ascend to the next plane.
Applying Brooks' trademark wit to an afterlife scenario, Defending Your Life is both biting and heartfelt.
After Life (1998)
In this tender existential meditation, a group of recently-deceased individuals find themselves in a drab limbo overseen by two counselors, Takashi (Arata) and Shiori (Erika Oda). Each of the dead must pick a single memory from their lives to accompany them into eternity, and once the memories are chosen, the counselors weave them into a collage of introspective cinematic beauty.
An ode to the power of memories, Hirokazu Kore-eda's (Shoplifters) is one of the profoundest treatments of the afterlife on film, inviting comparison to Bergman and Kurosawa in its humanistic approach to the eternal.
Enter the Void (2009)
American drug dealer, Oscar (Nathanial Brown) ekes out a hardscrabble existence in Tokyo with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), a prostitute. During a raid on a club, Oscar is killed and his soul leaves his physical body for a psychedelic journey through time, space, and his own miserable life.
This almost three-hour head trip from controversial director Gaspar Noé isn't for everyone, but its hard to deny its audacity. With a swooping, roving, bird's-eye-view camera, Enter the Void's cinematic eye feels like that of a mournful god, and the moment viewers "get" the film's title is both laughable and beautiful in its visceral, unvarnished, humanity.
A Ghost Story (2017)
A recently deceased man (Casey Affleck) wanders back to his suburban home to comfort his wife (Rooney Mara), but finds that he's unstuck in time and unable to reach her. Able only to ively observe as the love of his life moves on and eventually away, the spirit watched time from the present to an unknowable future and beyond.
David Lowery's creeping existential love story has been seen as pretentious by those who can't get behind its Halloween-costume-style sheet specters and infamously lengthy "pie scene," but A Ghost Story has riches to bestow on those patient enough.
Coco (2017)
Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) dreams of becoming a successful musician despite his family's generations-long ban on music of any kind. After attempting to steal a guitar from the grave of his idol, Miguel winds up in the Land of the Dead, where he encounters the roguish Héctor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who he enlists to help him discover the truth behind his family's distaste for the art of song.
Pixar Animation Studios' Coco is a culturally respectful and heartfelt rendering of the afterlife told with their signature visual flair and heart-on-one's-sleeve authenticity.
