Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Andrés Beltrán
Starring: Odette Annable, Tony Revolori, Allegra Leguizamo, Julio César Cedillo, Andrés Londoño, Chelsea Harris
Postmortem sees Colombian writer/director Andrés Beltrán channel Frankenstein and The Monkey's Paw with a substantial dash of Latin-American mythology. It follows similar recent indie horror movies concerning attempts to resurrect the dead like Birth/Rebirth and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, not to mention a couple of big budget Frankenstein flicks from Guillermo del Toro and Maggie Gyllenhaal. With the unfettered rise of AI, it's easy to see why so many filmmakers are currently invested in exploring the folly of attempting to create artificial life.
A year after losing her husband Richard (Andres Londono) to a heart attack, Helena (Odette Annable) isn't coping well. She has grown distant from her teenage daughter Julia (Allegra Leguizamo), who now prefers to spend her time with her grandmother. Helena plunges herself into her work as a medical examiner at the morgue of a hospital in a border town.
One night Helena's morgue receives 16 corpses, the members of a cult who killed themselves in the performance of a ritual aimed at bringing back their dead leader. Viewing the ritual on a camcorder found at the scene (how such evidence falls into Helena's hands is one of the movie's more fantastical aspects), Helena becomes obsessed with the idea that she could bring back Richard using the same method. Enlisting the one survivor of the mass suicide, Helena performs the ritual with the corpse of Richard, which she has secretly kept on ice in her morgue.
In classic Monkey's Paw fashion, Helena soon comes to regret her actions. The version of Richard that comes back is as human as the resurrected moppet from Pet Sematary. Even worse, Richard's reanimated body seems to be a vessel for Satan himself. Oops.
Postmortem is a slow burn horror whose supernatural hijinks only really begin in its final act. It mostly functions as a study of grief, and Annable is very good as a woman who is grieving in a very troubling manner. They say there is no wrong way to grieve, but keeping your dead spouse on ice and eating their hair, as Helena does here, doesn't seem entirely healthy to me (women will literally resurrect their dead hubby rather than going to therapy etc).
It's in that final act that Postmortem ramps up the horror in a way that suggests the influence of Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" chillers. There are some spooky shots of figures from the beyond glanced in shadowy backgrounds, and a finale makes effective use of the old trick of having to continuously light matches as a darkened basement is explored in spine-chilling fashion. Had the movie introduced such horrors much earlier it would have made for a more satisfying watch for genre fans.
