by James Mottram
From Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel to Josie and the Pussycats, moviemakers have frequently been enamoured by fictional musicians. This week at the Berlin Film Festival, Lucio Castro’s After This Death introduced one more into the pantheon of made-up divas: Elliott (Lee Pace), the enigmatic and charismatic lead singer of Likeliness Increases, a rock band formed with his brother Ronnie (Philip Ettinger).
The brothers, intriguingly, have always proclaimed they would make eleven albums, and no more. Then Elliott disappears shortly before the final LP can be completed, after having an affair with the heavily pregnant Isabel (Mía Maestro), an Argentinean woman he meets by chance on a hiking trip.
What emerges is a twisted love story, seen through the eyes of Isabel. “It’s hard to define it, but it’s definitely that – the mystery of life, a woman trying to find her true self,” says Castro, speaking at Berlinale. “What does she want to become? What does she want to be?”
Castro also toys with the idea that Elliott has such an effect on his fans, they almost form a cult around him. “To be a cult leader, you have to have these set rules – you have to define rules for yourself,” says Castro. “The world is made of facts that you invent: ‘I’ll make eleven albums!’ These are properties I’ve noticed in cultish figures. They’re not very open, not very flexible. They have this very set thing. People really follow them, like truths. So, them deciding they will do eleven albums adds to this – why eleven? Why not twelve?”
When it came to creating Elliott and Ronnie, Castro was partly inspired by the band Sparks, the sibling duo who scored Leos Carax’s 2021 drama Annette. “Now they’re pretty well known, but before they were not,” says Castro. “For many years, I loved them, but I didn’t know if they were lovers or siblings or who they were. Before the internet, before the cameras being on people all the time… I loved this idea, these cult figures… we didn’t know exactly who they were. They have this power over people through music, and I thought that was quite interesting.”
The Argentinean-born Maestro has known Castro since they were 14, growing up in Buenos Aires.
“The aesthetic of the music within the film is very much aligned to the music that he and I grew up with in the 1980s, after music in English had been banned for so many years following the dictatorship,” she explains. “There was this intelligent cult – supporting the bands and thanking them for coming all the way down to meet with this audience that had been banned from them. It would be Iggy Pop, The Ramones, The Stooges. It was just visceral and raw. They would give it all. And to this day, many of those musicians would say Argentina is the best audience they’ve ever played for.”
Also joining the party was British actress Gwendoline Christie, who features as Isabel’s best friend Alice, a music critic who is obsessed with Elliott’s band. “Alice is completely invested in the band and fixated by them,” says Christie. “The hypnotic effect that they elicit on the audiences even sweeps up Alice, with all of her seasoned rock critic experience. Even she’s enveloped in it. That’s the extent of their power. And also, from a technical point of view, it causes us in the audience to question Alice’s motives. Is she obsessed? Is it a dangerous obsession? How far is she willing to go? Is she willing to sacrifice her friend? Is she willing to betray her friend? Is she becoming obsessed with her friend?”
Well aware of intense fandom – she’s starred in Games of Thrones, the recent Star Wars films and now Apple TV+ show Severance – Christie appreciates what it all means. “I was an ardent music fan from when I was a child and a teenager… I was very involved in writing things with friends on a very basic teenage level, and I have a lot of friends who are music journalists, and I grew up around music journalists as well. It felt incredibly familiar to me… I have a lot of friends who are musicians too. I felt like I really knew it, because I really lived it from a young age.”
After This Death arrives just a month after the unveiling of another music-driven film, Opus, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Due out in March, the A24 horror stars John Malkovich as Alfred Moretti, a reclusive musician who was a big deal in the nineties, but hasn’t made an album in 27 years. While that movie got to use Chic’s Nile Rodgers and The-Dream to compose the music (with Malkovich even contributing to the vocals), Castro worked with Robert Lombardo, the composer who had previously worked on the director’s 2019 debut End of the Century.
“For us, it was really important that the music felt good, and not just made for the movie,” Castro says. “So that it felt like a real band. Robert and I, we started looking at references and bands to create a style for this band. What instruments they would use, how many instruments, how many people in the band – because that also influenced the sound they had. And then I did the lyrics [for five songs], which I have never done before. Which was really fun.”
Of course, none of this really works without the performance of Lee Pace as Elliott. Maestro calls him “a dear friend”, having worked with him on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. “That was a great bonding experience,” she says. “It was long hours of filming on location, in Baton Rouge and Vancouver. It was so interesting to invite Lee to the project. It was so beautiful to witness. It’s such a big transformation that he does, and he really embodied this role. And he actually bought a very different quality than what was in the script.”
Watching Pace – the actor best known for playing Thranduil in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy – perform on stage, gyrating his snake hips, is one of the pleasures of After This Death. “Honestly, that’s all Lee,” says Castro. “In the script, it was just a one line description – that he dances. But the dance he made… It’s all his. We didn’t have time to rehearse. We were just shooting. He did it many times. We shot in the theatre from many different angles. He was losing his voice… but it was him going at it.”
What After This Death shows is just how personal music and gigs really are, and why we become so bewitched by musicians. “I think that music communicates on a very intrinsic level. It goes beyond words, beyond pretension. It really connects with people on a very, very direct level. I thought that was interesting,” Castro continues. “Music is always the life. You record a song, and that song will always play. You hear people that are dead; it’s the dead calling. It’s almost like a continual ghost story. Most of the people I listen to are dead!”
After This Death will be released in 2025
