Every once in a while a film comes along starring an actor you have never seen before, who beguiles the screen and blows an audience away. Bonus points if they can do this without even raising their voice. It’s easy to steal scenes when you have an explosive arsenal, the kind of role that lets you play to the back of the room and take up all the space. Sebiye Behtiyar is not one of those characters in Bing Liu’s “Preparation for the Next Life.” She’s living on the periphery, determined to stay out of sight. We can’t take our eyes off her anyway.
“Preparation for the Next Life,” adapted from the novel by Atticus Lish, stars Behtiyar as Aishe, a half-Uyghur undocumented immigrant living in New York City. Her dreams are small. She wants to be self-sufficient and buy her own food cart. She keeps her head down, speaking to nobody except her deceased father, who taught her how to run. When she’s not working, she’s running. If anyone notices her, that’s a warning light. She’s been apprehended by immigration before. She can’t let that happen again.
So when Skinner, played by Fred Hechinger, notices her in a crowd, she’s skittish and unreceptive. He’s backpacking through the city, sleeping wherever he finds himself, and he finds Aishe fascinating. He follows her like a puppy and tries to impress her by doing pushups. Twenty? No, she says, a hundred. So he does a hundred and twenty. He’s incredibly eager to please, and for a while, he seems beautifully harmless.
Aishe and Skinner are two quiet, kind people, who live in the middle of a big city and are completely ignored by the surrounding country. She’s part of the workforce that makes up the backbone of the American economy, he’s a soldier with so much PTSD his doctors have essentially given up on him. They are the country’s dirty secrets, used and abused, yet absolutely vital.
“Preparation for the Next Life” hails from Liu, the director of the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary “Minding the Gap.” It’s adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”). Not every movie is equal to the sum of its parts, or even the talent of its filmmakers, but “Preparation for the Next Life” quietly crackles with their confident energy. Her screenplay is subtle, nuanced. His direction is elegant, patient. It’s the work of great artists.
And of course it’s their job to find the right cast for their production, but even so, newcomer Behtiyar contributes all the majesty of a seasoned performer. Her portrayal is organic, springing from the world in which she lives. It’s a breakout role but she doesn’t break out of the screen, she lives convincingly within it. When “Preparation” gives her its precious, few dramatic moments — on which a film with relatively little plot entirely swings — she resists any urge lunge at them. She works through them. Never mannered. Always natural. Incredible.
Hechinger has, in some respects, just as hard a job. He has to break that silence. You may remember him from “Gladiator II,” and you may or may not know he has a performance like this within him. Skinner is a good boy who’s been wounded, so wounded he may never recover, and he thinks all he has to do is make one other person happy and he’ll get all the emotional support he needs. The ugliest part of him — that is, aside from the unpredictable lashing out — is that, perhaps, he thinks he’s the best Aishe can get. So maybe she’ll have to put up with his outbursts. Maybe she’s even willing to live with that. Or maybe even the people at the lowest rung shouldn’t have to settle.
Watching a film like “Preparation for the Next Life,” based on a novel written over a decade ago and developed before the last half year of current events, can be distressing. Liu conveys the dangers of the undocumented immigrant experience, but knowing what we know now — that today, our protagonist would be subjected to all this and worse, including armed kidnapping and the horrors of America’s concentration camps — it’s even more galling. You can feel Liu’s film in your guts. It’s not just what he puts on camera. The context that the realities of 2025 add to this story churn the stomach.
“Preparation for the Next Life” is a wonder. Powerful subtlety. Quiet enormity. These are not contradictions, they are human experience at its fullest. Liu points his lens at life and life does the work, guided by a masterful screenplay and tender performances. The heart of this movie breaks. The heart of this movie endures.
