After this death

With After This Death, Argentine director Lucio Castro delivers an ambitious and elusive sophomore feature that feels both deeply personal and frustratingly opaque, a work that plays at the intersection of mystery, romance, and psychological drama without ever quite resolving into a defined shape. If his first film, End of the Century, was a tender, sun-drenched meditation on queer love and memory, this follow-up is the darker, autumnal counterpoint: a story set in the woods of upstate New York where encounters feel predestined, identities blur, and the lines between desire, art, and obsession dissolve into an unsettling fog.

At the heart of the film is Mia Maestro, who plays Isabel, an Argentine voice actress living in the United States with her husband Ted, portrayed with understated simplicity by Rupert Friend. Isabel’s marriage is already strained, marked by Ted’s absences and her own quiet sense of displacement, when a chance meeting alters the trajectory of her life. During a solitary hike, she encounters Elliot, played by Lee Pace, a charismatic yet aloof rock musician with an almost messianic aura. The meeting, staged in a cave with the faintest air of fairy-tale menace, is both ordinary and uncanny. When Isabel later attends a concert with her friend Alice (a sharp but underused Gwendoline Christie), she discovers that the enigmatic stranger is not only a musician but the enigmatic frontman of the cult band Likeliness Increases. What begins as flirtation soon spirals into a passionate affair, one made even more provocative by Isabel’s pregnancy and her awareness that her marriage exists in an ambiguous, open-ended state.

The affair between Isabel and Elliot carries much of the film’s dramatic weight, though it is built less on emotional intimacy than on an erotic tension that feels both intoxicating and unsettling. Maestro and Pace create moments of genuine chemistry—the film has already earned notoriety for its audacious “foot scene”—yet their connection often remains as enigmatic as the man himself. Elliot is written less as a fully fleshed character than as a mythic projection, the kind of aloof, faux-profound rock star whose every utterance is treated by his fans as scripture. Pace, with his commanding height and hypnotic delivery, embodies the archetype with swagger, though the film never fully convinces us of his stature as a cultural icon. As one critic remarked during the festival run, it is far easier to imagine Lee Pace as a cult leader than as a musician whose band could plausibly sustain a devoted following across ten albums. This tension—between the myth the film wants us to believe and the reality we observe—becomes one of After This Death’s most persistent flaws.

Still, Mia Maestro grounds the narrative with a performance of quiet magnetism, reminding us of an actress whose Hollywood trajectory never quite matched her talent. There is a sense of rediscovery here, as though Lucio Castro, who previously directed her in End of the Century, knew exactly how to harness her blend of vulnerability and defiance. Maestro’s Isabel is a woman suspended between identities: Argentine and American, wife and lover, mother-to-be and independent artist. Her narration, delivered in Spanish, deepens the character’s sense of displacement, as though her inner life belongs to another world entirely. This layering of languages and identities underscores one of Lucio Castro’s recurring obsessions: the way people reinvent themselves across borders and relationships, only to discover that the past is never quite erased.

But while Maestro keeps the film anchored, the narrative itself often meanders. After Elliot vanishes without explanation, the film shifts into a more thriller-like register, as Isabel finds herself the target of Elliot’s obsessive fans. Known as TPYS—“The People You See”—these followers project their anxieties about the band’s unfinished final album onto her, convinced she holds the key to unlocking Elliot’s legacy. This toxic fandom subplot injects menace but also exposes the film’s structural weaknesses. What could have been a sharp commentary on parasocial devotion and online conspiracy culture instead drifts into vague menace, with anonymous threats and cryptic messages piling up without building to a satisfying crescendo. For some, this ambiguity is part of the point—Lucio Castro has been compared to David Lynch in his ability to leave questions dangling—but here it often feels more like narrative inertia.

Visually, however, After This Death exerts a steady pull. Cinematographer Barton Cortright captures the woods of upstate New York in permanent autumn, draping the story in hues of copper and green that make every scene feel at once romantic and ominous. The score, composed by Robert Lombardo and Yegang Yoo, adds another dimension: droning synths and cryptic lyrics from Elliot’s band bleed into Isabel’s reality, while airy counter-melodies suggest her inner life resisting absorption into his myth. This tension between the oppressive weight of fandom and Isabel’s quiet search for selfhood becomes the film’s most compelling undercurrent, even when the plot falters.

What is most striking, though, is the way After This Death engages with coincidence and myth-making. The meeting of Isabel and Elliot in a cave, her pregnancy coinciding with his birthday, the fans’ belief in a prophesied “final album”—all of these details flirt with absurdity, yet Lucio Castro leans into them unapologetically. The film even dares to namecheck Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though its tone is closer to a Lynchian fever dream than to Hitchcock’s clockwork precision. For some viewers, this refusal to ground its narrative in plausibility will prove maddening. For others, it is precisely in these coincidences, these uncanny echoes, that the film’s strange allure lies. Like fandom itself, the film thrives on the compulsion to search for meaning where none may exist.

One is left with the feeling that After This Death is less a story than a mood, less a narrative than a labyrinth of desires and projections. Lucio Castro resists offering answers, instead presenting a world where every encounter could be coincidence or destiny, every disappearance a loss or a transformation. The film lingers not through its plot mechanics but through its textures: a glance between Maestro and Pace, the haunted silence of an empty cabin, the way a lyric can sound both profound and hollow depending on who is listening. In this sense, the film mirrors the experience of obsession itself—questions leading to more questions, meaning dissolving the closer one looks.

After This Death is a flawed but fascinating work, one that never quite fulfills the promise of its opening act but still manages to exert a hypnotic grip. It is a film of contradictions—pretentious yet beguiling, inert yet magnetic, distant yet intimate. What rescues it from self-parody is Mia Maestro, whose luminous performance transforms Isabel from a pawn in someone else’s myth into a figure of quiet resilience. If the film feels like Lucio Castro’s “difficult second album,” then perhaps the lesson is that difficulty itself can be revealing. Like a cult record that baffles on first listen, After This Death may frustrate as much as it fascinates, but it lingers—like a half-remembered song, like a lover who vanished without a trace.

After this death 
Written and directed by Lucio Castro
Produced by Caroline Clark, Patrick Donovan, Anita Gou, David Hinojosa, Luca Intili            
Starring  Mía Maestro, Lee Pace, Rupert Friend, Philip Ettinger, Gwendoline Christie, Vivi Tellas, Jack Haven, Timeca M. Seretti,; Marita de Lara, Jordan Carlos, Stephanie Jean Lane, Laurent Rejto, Yi Liu, Ollie Robinson, Colin Ryan
Music by Robert Lombardo, Yegang Yoo
Cinematography : Barton Cortright
Edited by Kali Ann Kahn
Production companies : Zam, Kindred Spirit
Distribution : NC
Release date : NC
Running time : 96 minutes

Seen September 10 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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