When it comes to life and death, our natural inclination is to think of them as opposites. We keep the dying in hospitals and the dead in mortuaries. We think of anyone who spends all their time in hospitals or shares their home with a mortuary as a bit off. We take our vitamins, get our exercise, and drink filtered water if we want to live. We eat junk food, never leave our couch, and smoke five packs a day if we want to die. But as we see when a little boy living in his family's private retirement home strikes up a friendship with an elderly magician who has come there to, well, die, in some cases the very things we seek to live are the very same things we seek to so that we can die.

At the center of the film Is Anybody There? is a young boy named Edward (Bill Milner). When the movie opens he is sitting around a table of mostly octogenarians celebrating Christmas and the one-year anniversary of his family's retirement home. One man asks him what Father Christmas brought him. His response, "I don't believe in him." But when we next stumble up him recording (and then playing back) the tape of a resident's last breaths, we see that while Edward may not believe in Santa Claus, the existence of some form of life beyond the here and now is something he desperately wants to prove.

Enter Clarence (Michael Caine), a curmudgeon of an old man who was once a great magician and is now the newest (and must reluctant member) of Lark Hall. As he tells Edward's mother when he first arrives, "This is temporary, only temporary." As the note on his hand reading, "Go to Purgatory," indicates, he has other plans. But as his seeming eagerness to turn out the lights once and for all and Edward's determination to prove that the lights don't just go off collide, both boy and man are faced with the hopelessness that there is nothing beyond this life, the hope that there is, and the uncomfortable realities that prevent us from not only believing in a life beyond this one but even looking forward to the life that lies beyond this day.

As Clarence says to Edward, "Your life changes and not always for the better. You accumulate regrets and they stick to you like bruises." As we learn as Clarence and Edward's relationship unfolds, Clarence has some fairly heavy regrets. "You know what they're going to say on my grave," he tells Edward. "He was old, he fucked it up, then he died." But as Edward keeps trying to contact the dead and Clarence finds himself trying to contact his own ghosts, what the two reflect is the belief that our regrets and failures might be made better if only we could go back or go forward and make them right. "If I could tell her I was sorry, what a difference it would make," Clarence tells Edward's mother. "If you come back as a person, you get a chance to put it right again," proposes Edward.

With significantly fewer years under his belt than Clarence, Edward's interest in life beyond death comes off as slightly different. Bullied at school and displaced from his own room at home, Edward's fascination with the afterlife can be seen as a search for belonging. Increasingly aware of conflict between his parents and led to feel like they might see him as a regret, his need to record some evidence of the Beyond reflects a need to know that life is more than just an accident that was turned on and can be turned off as easily as his bedroom lamp. As he cries out when Clarence essentially tells him there's absolutely nothing after you die, "It can't just be black!"

Continue: 1 2