Hereafter is a movie about death, not murder and mayhem, or ghosts jumping out at you from dark corners.
This is a powerful, emotional movie that is more of a philosophical look at death.
This is not a fast-paced movie, and standing at just over two hours, parts of it can seem to drag a little bit.
It keeps interesting by alternating between three main story lines involving people that are dealing with death in very different ways.
The first character focused on is Marie, a woman visiting South Asia with her boyfriend when the Tsunami hit.
She is played by a very promising French actress Cecile De France in her first lead American role.
In a visually masterful scene, Marie is sucked into the first big wave that rolled into the streets.
As she is struggling for air, a floating car hits her, knocking her out and causing her drown. She is pulled out by two men that attempt to revive her and, thinking it is a lost cause, walk away.
At this time, Marie sees visions of people in the shadows, but is ripped away as she regains consciousness and rejoins the living world.
When she returns home with her boyfriend and back to her job, she is so pre-occupied with what happened to her during those few minutes she was dead that she starts to lose everything that she cares about, forcing her to deal with what happened.
Next, we meet George, played by Matt Damon, who is acts impeccably as always.
George deals with something very different than Marie. He is a man that has been able to speak with the dead since he was young, and he used to make a very good living as a ìpsychicî.
One day, he decided living with the dead was no way to live, and so he walked away.
The problems with this is that Georgeís brother wonít let him leave and repeatedly tries to return to being a psychic, no girls will date him because they canít deal with his gift (or curse, as he refers to it) and his new job isnít going anywhere.
All he wants to do is move on and is finding out that it is impossible to do.
The last characters that we meet are identical twin brothers Marcus and Jason, played by newcomers Frankie and George McLaren.
Jason is the older, louder caretaker. Their mother is an alcoholic, their father is absent, and social services keeps trying to take them away.
In the mist of all of this, Jason is hit by a car and killed instantly, and Marcus is ripped out of his home and placed with a foster family.
Marcus then tries to figure out how to care for himself while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life.
So the movie goes on, creating a web between the three characters until they become connected.
Clint Eastwood has done it again. He has directed another beautifully-acted, heartbreaking film that continues to resonate long after the credits have rolled.
It has a very similar feel to the rest of his films; the impeccable acting of Million Dollar Baby, the atmosphere of Unforgiven and the soundtrack of Gran Torino.
What is different about this movie is that there is very little action, no quick dialogue and comedy is very rare.
This means if you are looking for a movie that has a lot of action or makes you jump at every turn, then Hereafter is probably not the movie for you.
But if you can get beyond that and let yourself go, you will find yourself on an amazing ride.