Afterlife

The Afterlife here is the life the characters find not after their own death but after the death of the man who has tyrannicaly ruled this classically dysfunctional family. Director Virag Zomberacz denies any political context, declaring its psychological themes primary. 

The mother persists in her quiet service and devotion to her children, a boy and a younger adopted Roma girl, through their respective stress and humiliations.

The pastor’s sister is freed from her claim to have dedicated her life to her brother. Him gone, she expands her authority in the house. She advises the mother to send her children away. She starts an affair with the other local pastor, suffers through his embarrassment and abandonment, then impetuously runs off with him, just before he’s arrested for defrauding the church.

The son Mozes occupies the film’s centre. His name suggests one who leads his people out of slavery, but here it’s mainly himself. He has felt most thwarted of growth and self-realization. In his first appearance, as he is released from a psychiatric clinic, Mozes clings to the doctor not his father. The pastor admits he hasn’t met the boy’s needs. He says he’s happy to work out a new relationship with his son, but still turns off the lights as he leaves the boy’s bedroom, ending his reading. He respects his son’s new vegetarianism by slapping a thick slab of meat on his plate, which ends up puke in the wastepaper basket. The father’s way of letting his son make his own life is to drag him off fishing and announce he has “volunteered” him to go work in a leper colony.

The father’s death seems to pause nature. The fish he caught with Mozes refuses to die. The dove released at his funeral, intended to signify his soul’s flight to heaven, stays ground bound despite the pastor’s kicks. And as the auto mechanic/spiritualist advisor explains, Mozes is visited by his father’s ghost because something has yet to be finished. Given any son’s need to come to terms with his father the ghost probably embodies Mozes’s unpreparedness to give up his father yet.

Mozes tries to move into a fuller life despite the ghost’s inhibiting presence. He tries a folk dancing class but flees, feeling inadequate. He falls in with Angela, the young girl in rehab capitalizing on the church job and halfway house life his father arranged for her but that his successor has cancelled. By consigning the father’s ghost to the closet Mozes finally has sex with Angela, but she shortly dumps him for the fireman at the community center’s destruction.

Mozes has extended Angela’s stay by having her help him assume his father’s community service role. The father died while counselling an engaged couple. The groom was trying to proceed despite having found the bride deflowered by a buddhist. When Mozes resumes the counselling, he’s too late. The couple has married and the woman has already run off with the buddhist. It’s too late for the groom but Mozes still has time. In a major advance he asks his father “Can’t I do anything wrong without you telling me?”

Mozes’s greatest success, however ambivalent, is taking over his father’s direction of the Christmas pageant. Before it begins Mozes locks his little sister's bully in the closet, an act of familial support. So he has to play the Virgin Mary himself. As yet uninitiated by the unangelic Angela, Mozes might fit the traditional role — in the blue robe, lipstick — had he not added the graphic representation of Mary having sex with the invisible holy humping spirit and then sporting a huge pillowed pregnancy. When the nativity straw catches fire and burns down the community centre Mozes is not entirely to blame. But he is credited with having given the community its liveliest entertainment.  

The ghost is finally freed when Mozes is ready to stand alone. He refuses the other adults’ pressure to return to the clinic “to rest.” Instead he breaks out in the aggressive car-ride — which includes confronting the police, another domineering authority — at which he failed when his father was there. He gives the ghost the pleasure his father missed and the car this time holds together.

     Mozes’s empowering is paralleled by his little sister’s. She quietly suffers the father’s loss and the kids’ bullying. Mozes sends her away when she first seeks his comfort. But in the school pageant he has her soar above the others as the angel Gabriel. She later despatches the other pastor’s wounded dog with a rifle.

     After the dove finally flies off, with the father’s spirit, Mozes puts the stubborn fish out of his misery by returning him to the lake. Still inept, his rowboat leaves without an oar. But his father completely gone Mozes can expect some normal luck. An attractive young girl in her own rowboat draws up, presumably to return him to life’s adventures ashore. Mozes's life proper begins.