A mixed bag of provocative sci-fi concepts brought half to life with somnambulant follow-through, Pierro Messina’s futuristic mortality drama “Another End” leaves you bittersweet and wistful. You’re grateful for the time spent with a genuine epic of ideas and rueful that such heady themes weren’t more fully explored in a better film.
Imagining a world where living surrogates might be used to carry the memories and minds of the recently deceased, the filmmakers cannot be faulted for lack of thematic ambition — only within this bout of imaginative world-building, they’ve managed to find the least interesting story to tell.
That story belongs to Sal (Gael García Bernal), a recently widowed 40-something, himself sleepwalking through an unnamed glass-and-steel metropolis as polished as it is alienating. That’s just as well for our guilt and grief-struck lead — he was, after all, drunk behind the wheel for the car crash that claimed his beloved. But Sal’s sister, Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) wishes her bro a brighter future. As luck would have it, little sis has the best job in town — and perhaps the only, given the Aeterna Corporation’s looming insignia on every high-rise and billboard.
That Aeterna might very well be the first gazillion-dollar company should come as little surprise given their product: The chance to say a long, therapeutic goodbye to loved ones, mentally reanimated and hosted in the bodies of human surrogates known as “hosts.” The specifics, limitations and apparent widespread use of this procedure lend the film’s opening act a welcome air of inscrutability as time and again director Messina plops us into seemingly benign interactions that veer off into surreal and puzzling turns ahead of a long exposition drop. And then cycle rinse repeat.
One needn’t strain to see the process as an analogy for Messina’s own job. Quite the contrary. And once Aeterna employee Ebe gets her late sister-in-law’s consciousness booted up into the host body of Renate Reinsve, “Another End” forces the comparison.
From the meticulously staged ambulance wake-up meant to create a so-called “bridge memory” convincing the young woman that she survived the fatal crash, to subsequent moments of domestic reconnection — as Sal must play-act, hearing old memories come from a new and unfamiliar scene-partner — the film lays down its cards with a heavy hand.
The fact that Messina and cowriters Giacomo Bendotti, Valentina Gaddi and Sebastiano Melloni peer into this chrome-buffed future and see their own reflections is one of the film’s great frustrations.
For the newly reanimated “Zoe” (Reinsve) has not returned as some digital or synthetic avatar, but is instead renting the corporeal real estate of a very alive young woman named Ava. More to the point, every surrogate in a society that seemingly bases a large part of its GDP upon them shares the same situation. Considering these hosts’ professional requirements — allowing their memories to be wiped in order to better service the emotional and often physical needs of the clients — the filmmakers’ odd reluctance to even interrogate the very clear questions of economics and social class rings all the more peculiar.
Oh, they do pay lip service in a roundabout way — following Sal as he in turn follows his unplugged host only to learn that she is (gasp) an eagerly self-obliterating sex worker. But just as Sal had the good fortune to see his beloved return as Reinsve, this specific ethical get-out-jail-free card is similarly one-in-a-million. That point is made clear the more time we spend with the real-life woman. For Ava is not only an Aeterna employee, she’s also a paying client with a very different form of grief and thus a particular set of needs that cannot be explained away so easily.
Just who might host for Ava is a question the film halfway poses, but the filmmakers never think to answer. Rather than interrogating the very world it creates, “Another End” hews another, easier path, turning around familiar notions of star-crossed romance resonating from beyond the afterlife, keeping a head in the clouds when all the most interesting aspects are right there on the ground.
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