After She Died

Director: Jack Dignan
Starring: Liliana de la Rosa, Vanessa Madrid, Paul Talbot, Barbara Bingham, Adam Golledge, Greg Poppelton, Noah Fowler
Distributor: Amazon Prime
Runtime: 101 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2023
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Horror themes and violence.

A grieving teenager is horrified to discover that her father’s new girlfriend looks identical to her dead mother.

A good choice for an ominous title. This is a very small-budget Australian film (although, with the stylish cinematography, it doesn’t seem like it).

For a long time, there has been great popularity for gory horror films. But, more recently, there has been something of a shift to dramas of menace, the atmosphere of the eerie, certainly some horror touches, gory moments that fit into the developing plot – and, of course, a part of the climax and the finale. After She Died is in this vein. It has been written and directed by Dignan his previous work included shorts as well as special effects in such films as Thor, Love and Thunder.

The film starts quietly enough, concentrating on the affectionate interaction between a mother and daughter (interestingly, Hispanic background and communicating sometimes in Spanish, with subtitles). The father is somewhat in the background. And, then, without explanation, although the scene between mother and daughter did seem like something of a farewell, the mother dies and is buried.

Jen, the daughter is played by de la Ros and the mother Isabel is played by Madrid. Quite some acting demands are made on both actresses as the increasingly eerie plot develops.

A typical teenager, Jen is often upset at quarrels between father and mother and then has to deal with her mother’s death. Her father almost immediately finds a new girlfriend who is, eerily, very much like her mother. It has quite an effect on Jan, sometimes acting normally at meals, at other times becoming more and more paranoid. And this involves her friend Louis (Golledge). Another friend Cameron (Annabelle Andrew) is the life of the party, ambitious, is becoming quieter at home, a touch zombie-like.

So, the question: what happened to the mother after she died? There are visits to the cemetery and the digging up of graves, and encounters with an eerie character ‘The Sheep-Man’ (Fowler).

The new mother, Florence (Madrid) doing a variation on her first appearance as the mother, becomes more smilingly sinister, seemingly normal, fostering Jen, yet interfering, and behaving in stranger and stranger ways.

So, what is left, but a grand finale, confrontation between mother and daughter, the fate of the father, and some horror blood, gore and death.

It will be interesting to see the next film with the imagination of Jack Dignan.