And then Beth shows up. Baena's fatty script keeps the momentous, unexplainable event from rattling the cage. It spooks the Slocums, who overprotect their undead daughter from a world that just wouldn't understand, and sends 300 volts of WTF through Zach's malaise. Her appearance doesn't rewire anyone's existence. It's life as normal — now with more bickering!
A good chunk of Life After Beth is spent pitting Zach and Maury against one another in a battle of male dominance. Reilly has the wry comedic chops to make the stiff dialogue his own. DeHaan, not so much. Baena's film is focused on the light at the end of the tunnel, gory gags and small town destruction, but it never lays the tracks to get there. DeHaan spends most of the movie flailing, waiting anxiously to jump to the next stepping stone. Life After Beth provokes headaches instead of laughs.
The dramatic meandering eventually makes way for Beth's bloodthirsty, hormonal devolution. Life After Beth flexes its production value with fits of super strength. At one point, Zach's failed attempts to serenade Beth sends her tearing through a lifeguard shack with her bare hands. The smaller moments are the film's gems. Beth's zombification is akin to an ultra-clingy girlfriend. In a scene where her and Zach finally find some alone time in the attic, aggressive nuzzling rings frighteningly close to a living dead gorging on a throat.
Even with ethereal synths, washed photography, and a bag full of zombie movie tropes, Baena can't snowball these moments into the bigger picture. They hang there, derailed by sitcom-y spurts of action and didactic metaphors. After realizing that his post-death relationship with Beth might be taking a turn for the worse (e.g. she wants to eat people), Zach stumbles into Erica (Anna Kendrick), an old friend and clear ideal for the struggling romantic. Beth doesn't take kindly to the rekindled friendship, Baena drawing on-the-nose parallels between the woman's zombieness and the worst kind of paranoid girlfriend. It's a tragic misstep for a film that isn't sure who to point a finger at, which psyche to pick apart using this otherworldly scenario. Young love is complicated. Instead of sinking its teeth into the meaty material, Life After Beth dies a slow death into effects-laden conclusion. When Paul Reiser quibbling with his dead dad is the highlight of your youth-skewing rom-com, there's a problem (but believe it: the moment is gold).