Gael Garcia Bernal in Sci-Fi Grief Drama – The Hollywood Reporter

In his 2015 debut feature, The Wait, Piero Messina cast Juliette Binoche as a mother grieving her son, withholding news of his death from his girlfriend, perhaps as a means of keeping his spirit alive. The Italian director revisits the wrenching process of bereavement and the reluctance to let go in a decidedly more high-concept context in Another End, which boasts engrossing work from a solid ensemble and polished production values but becomes increasingly cold and ponderous, even before inching past the two-hour mark.

Just as Binoche’s gifts elevated the earlier film, the key asset here is Gael García Bernal, who brings a depth of feeling too often dulled elsewhere by the fussy future-tech details of the central premise. The more that aspect is explained the more it all seems like a distended Black Mirror episode.

Bernal plays Sal, first seen having tea with a chatty elderly neighbor who shows no reaction when uniformed technicians enter her apartment, strip down her husband, who’s been sitting mutely in a corner armchair, then zip him up inside a plastic transport casing and wheel him out the door. He’s delivered, along with countless other sleeping bodies, to a facility revealed to be part of a corporation called Aeterna.

A subway advertisement for the company bears the tagline: “Another End: Take Your Time to Say Goodbye.” It gradually becomes clear that the service involves transference of the memories of the deceased, referred to in corporate-speak as “absent ones,” into financially compensated host bodies vetted for compatibility. This means grieving customers can have the time necessary to tie up unresolved issues and bring peace and acceptance to the final separation.

Where the script by Messina, Giacomo Bendotti, Valentina Gaddi and Sebastiano Melloni trips over itself is in the inordinate amount of complicated detail loaded onto these transactions.

The duration of the absent ones’ replacements is flexible but non-negotiably decided by Aeterna; the procedure is available only for a limited time, before memories are erased; hosts must consent to sex in advance if the situation might require it; a “memory bridge” is implanted to make the rescue or recovery of the dead loved one plausible to the host, whose own consciousness is suspended and who must remain unaware of the switch while it’s active; and the chance of “dream residue” in the hosts can cause problems.

Sol’s new upstairs neighbors also show the possibility of multiple absent family members being “kept alive” by hosts, as the harried Juliette (Olivia Williams) copes with the frustrations of a volatile teenage daughter (Amina Ben Ismaïl) and indulgent husband (Tim Daish).

Since the death of his partner Zoe, in circumstances revealed only late in the film, Sol has been depressed to a degree of sufficient concern to make his sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) move in, on the alert for suicidal signals. Ebe works for Aeterna, and when she finds a match to serve as host for Zoe’s memories, Sol is resistant. But after backing away on a first try, he consents to bring her home in the body of Ava (Renate Reinsve).

His initial awkwardness around her dissolves once they reconnect over an argument, moving beyond what appears to have been a rough patch in the relationship prior to Zoe’s death. A cheerful dinner with her bereaved parents delights her mother (Angela Bain) and even wins over her prickly father (Philip Rosch) after his initial indignation toward the idea.

But Sol’s full-hearted embrace of Zoe’s artificial life extension crosses lines that cause friction with Aeterna supervisor Dr. Doyle (Pal Aron) and make trouble for Ebe at work. Those problems only worsen once the Aeterna contract ends and Sol makes contact with Ava outside the agreement.

Bernal is an intensely watchable actor, keeping you emotionally invested in Sol’s raw feelings, while Bejo, Reinsve and Williams bring as much nuance as possible to their thinly written characters. But for a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

A major reveal late in the action has limited impact, and access to Ava’s private world — she’s an erotic dancer at a high-end sex club — feels less like an essential part of the plot than an attempt to juice up a film that by that point has become numbingly slow. A soundtrack sprinkled with sleepy trip hop-style electronica doesn’t help. The questions the film asks, about whether the ephemeral second chances offered by Aeterna are healing or harmful, owe something to Solaris. But the reflections stirred up by this scenario lack the weight to leave the audience ruminating on them for long.