Mía Maestro and Lee Pace in Dark Mystery

Argentinian writer-director Lucio Castro made a quiet stunner of a first feature in 2020 with the exquisitely evocative queer romance, End of the Century. Trading the beaches and parks of Barcelona for woodsy upstate New York in the fall, the filmmaker delivers a self-consciously enigmatic drama that includes a messianic electro-psychedelic rock star with a cult following, a torrid affair, a family tragedy, a near-fatal hiking accident and a car careening over a bridge, its driver missing and eventually presumed dead. Oh, there’s also toxic fandom that becomes a physical threat.

Despite all that and its momentous title, After This Death isn’t really about anything. Or at least nothing that holds the attention for long. Where End of the Century felt intimately personal, the new film is a studied and distancing slog that feels considerably longer and slower than its 96-minute run time. The script name-checks Hitchcock — specifically Vertigo and Shadow of a Doubt — but the result feels more Lynchian lite.

If you really want to see Lee Pace get his toes sucked after admitting that his feet smell, however, this might be your bag. The actor is 6’4” and wears a size 12 shoe, so that’s probably a lot of toe.

Pace plays Elliott, who does vocals — and more snaking hand gestures than Stevie Nicks — in a band he started with his brother Ronnie (Philip Ettinger). Elliott meets heavily pregnant Argentinian voiceover actress Isabel (Mía Maestro) when she’s taking a maté break in a cave on a hiking trail and he appears out of nowhere. He’s a mellow neo-hippie type so she doesn’t feel unsafe and seems even halfway amused when he shows her a cave painting of a hunchback holding a pearl button. If that has any relevance to the rest of the film, it escaped me.

When her music journo friend Alice (Gwendoline Christie in a nothing part) drags Isabel to a concert, she finds herself in an audience full of spellbound fans reverentially watching Elliott do his rock god thing — spouting mystical nonsense lyrics to droning synths, with a touch of interpretive dance. Isabel, to her credit, doesn’t shower him with fake praise backstage. He explains that Ronnie is the brains behind the outfit: “He’s the smart one. I’m the pretty one.”

That’s enough to get Isabel intrigued. After a demonstration of his oral skills in the parking lot, she tells him her husband, Ted (Rupert Friend), is out of town and invites him to come over, which is when the toe-sucking happens. They have amazing sex, natch, first at Isabel’s place and subsequently at the cool cabin Elliott and Ronnie rented for a year and filled with recording equipment while working on an album. Isabel justifies her infidelity by explaining that Ted is away often and she’s sure he sleeps with lots of other people.

Elliott admits he’s turned on by Isabel being pregnant and even makes a mixtape for the baby. Strangely, nothing about the rock star creeps her out, but he drifts away for reasons that are never made clear. And that’s when lots of bad things start to happen.

They include cryptic messages from Elliott after he goes missing; sad times and then bad times with Ted; and a swell of online animosity from fans blaming Isabel for canceled gigs and delays in the completion of the band’s eagerly awaited 11th album. It’s when those superfans, who call themselves TPYS (The People You See), start coming for her that Isabel’s life spins into chaos.

The actors are all solid enough, as is the filmmaking craft, with moody use of a score by Roberto Lombardo and Yegang Yoo that ranges from somber pipes to trance-like synthesizer riffs to tinkling piano. But things just happen in After This Death without ever accumulating much narrative weight or clarity, despite an occasional clue found in the band’s songs.

What of the online rumors circulating that Elliott and Ronnie might not really be brothers and maybe could even be lovers? That’s just another undercooked idea that gets aired and instantly forgotten.

There might be some significance in Isabel’s lingering pain from the loss of her mother when she was 17, and the echoes of that sorrow in events depicted here. Either way, that seems part of the driving force that compels her to get to the recording studio in the cabin and start channeling Kate Bush. Which I guess points to Isabel reclaiming her life and embarking on a future, which makes more sense than just about anything else in this elliptical blur.

The most intriguing mystery in the end is how did this supposed underground band, with their monotonous sound and their pretentious, ersatz poetic lyrics, develop enough of a following to have ten albums under their belt? On the plus side though, I will say Rupert Friend does an excellent impersonation of Liam Neeson in Taken, which might be the only part of his role that’s not entirely thankless.