‘Another End’ Review: Gael García Bernal and Renate Reinsve Illuminate a Pensive, Familiar Story of Love After Death
17.02.2024 - 19:09
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang It’s ironic that memory is the central theme of Piero Messina‘s Berlin Competition title “Another End,” when so many of its twists and turns are so directly lifted from other films that it feels like you’ve seen them before; even watching it for the first time feels like rewatching. But if that makes this elegiac literalization of the timeless theme of “what is grief but love persevering?” a rather edgeless experience it’s not a wholly unpleasant one.
Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us. Indeed, the story’s central alarming incident has happened some time before the film even begins: a car crash for which Sal (Gael García Bernal) believes he was responsible and in which his wife died.
Unable to cope with his guilt and grief, Sal resorts to replaying her memories — a tech which this near-future society has perfected — and even attempts suicide. His sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo), who is suspiciously tireless in her efforts to comfort him, encourages him to use the services of the company she works for, Another End.
At the company’s big gleaming facility, they can download a dead person’s memories into a consenting “host” essentially reanimating them in a different body. For a short time, you can have your loved one back.
Apparently not realizing that we don’t tend to make the best decisions while in the throes of grief, and expressly against the wishes of his shattered father-in-law, Sal eventually agrees to the procedure. Lucky for him, the “compatible” body found to house his dead partner Zoe, is that of Ava (Renate Reinsve),
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