Clint Eastwood has a new movie coming out called Hereafter, which deals with the topic of life after death. Michael Tymn, blogger and author of The Articulate Dead, pointed me to an interesting review of the film by John H. Foote, who has a more personal perspective on this subject than most.
Foote writes:
Two hours later [i.e., after the film had been screened], it was an audience divided. While some, like myself, liked the film and applauded Eastwood’s daring for once again stepping outside his comfort zone, many wondered: Just what was Eastwood thinking in making a metaphysical study that feels so much like a European film?
“Hereafter” is a handsomely [made] film about the question of an afterlife. It has a deeper meaning for me perhaps as nine years ago I was in a near fatal car accident, and spent three weeks in a coma in the intensive care unit of Toronto's famous Sunnybrook Hospital. While unconcious for that time I saw things as real to me as the people on the street I see every day, as true to me as my wife and kids, and I cannot to this day discuss the matter without weeping, or explain entirely what happened to me.
The doctors told me it was a combination of the intense pain and the morphine. Maybe, but how did these, visions I suppose attach themselves so powerfully to my soul, to my mind? To this day the memory of the visions haunts me, and thus I believe we go somewhere after this life, though I don’t know where.
Eastwood's daring, meditative film explores that, yes, perhaps there is something that comes after, and there are people who have been given connections to the dead.