This film had so much potential. The first 45 minutes were completely devastating for me. Roughly 20 newly dead Japanese citizens show up at a kind of commune with a school-like headquarter where they will decide one specific memory from their life to be made into a film that they can bring with them into eternity where their memories will be erased, leaving only the memory that they each now have on film as their only mementos from their time on Earth. And….exhale. Watching the interviews, which have a documentary quality to them, where the dead people shuffle through meaningful memories, trying to pick the one that matters most to them is massively poignant. Of course, viewers of this film will simultaneously shuffle through their own memories, which ones are the most important. Good and bad memories from my life swarmed back to me during this film, and I was reminded that when I do actually die, I won’t have the option of taking one of them with me; they will all just disappear completely.
And it’s not like taking one memory would be much better, anyway. I struggled to decide if this film saw this situation as heaven or hell. To be sitting for eternity with one specific memory on a loop sounds pretty hellish to me. I was reminded of a nightmare that I had only a few days ago, in which I was killed (this was a long and complicated process, but not important to this paragraph), and was immediately ushered into a room, about 15 x 15 ft., all black walls about 10 feet high, concrete floor, one light in the middle of the ceiling, maybe 15 watts, not too bright, no furniture, no doors. And that was it, I was to stay in this room for the rest of eternity. Made me think of the last episode of Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper is still in the black lodge, to this day, I believe.
The film loses its footing halfway through, though, and begins a soap opera in which two staff members (also dead) who work at the commune and interview the dead begin a sort of love triangle with one of the dead. Not in a sex way, but in way that is too convoluted to detail, but basically they fight for each others’ memories. Not to mention that the dead man in this triangle (which actually might be a square) is allowed to have access to 70 VHS tapes, each one has footage from each year of his life, to help him decide which memory to have made into a film. But if there is already actual footage of the people’s lives, why the need to remake these memories into films? Can’t they just pick one of the VHS tapes to bring with them? Bad move, introducing this.
All in all, good idea for a film, but it gets too melodramatic and unnecessarily complex towards the end.