Review: 'After Death' is a documentary about near-death experiences that's only for those who already believe

Ambiguity is the space where good documentaries thrive — that limbo where the truth is unknowable, and the filmmakers present the possibilities and let the viewer to make up their minds. Ambiguity is also something from which the makers of “After Death” flee as fast as their faith-based re-enactments can carry them.

As the title tells us, the subject here is what happens when people die — the ultimate unknowable, since people who have died don’t return their text messages. Directors Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke have to settle for talking to people who have had near-death experiences (which happens often enough, the movie tells us, that they use the abbreviation NDE).

The first person we meet is Dale Black, a former airline pilot, who describes a trip he took in a small plane with two other pilots in 1969 — and how, when the plane crashed into a pavilion, he found himself floating about the scene, looking down at three bodies, his two dead colleagues and himself. 

Gray and Radtke present several stories like this, usually with re-enactments to illustrate the moments for which there is no footage. A car is hit by a semi on a narrow bridge. A kayaker shoots the rapids and ends up under a waterfall. A man suffers from a perforated duodenum in Paris, and the hospital can’t find a doctor to perform the emergency surgery. And so on.

Three other interview subjects also speak a lot during the film. One is Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist who has compiled stories of people describing their near-death experiences. Another is John Burke, an author and a pastor, who has written a list of the common traits of near-death experiences. And the third, Michael Sabom, is a retired cardiologist who has interviewed hundreds of people who have had near-death experiences.

Sabom is the most fascinating voice here, because he’s as close to being a skeptic as the movie finds. Sabom presents himself as someone trying to apply scientific rigor to the idea that people approach the brink of death and come back — and frequently report that they saw their own bodies, and the frantic medical personnel trying to save them. When they are resuscitated, some of the interview subjects say, they recount details of the doctors and nurses that an unconscious person would not have seen. (Cue the “Twilight Zone” music.)

But the point of “After Death” isn’t scientific proof, which is why Sabom is a no-show for most of the movie’s second half. It’s here that the stories get into dark tunnels, a bright light, meetings with departed relatives and, right up to the end, the figure of God. In this movie, it’s always a Christian god. If Buddhists or Muslims or other faiths have near-death experiences, they apparently weren’t sought out for this movie.

“After Death” is being released by Angel Studios, the Provo-based distributor known for two recent successes. One is the TV series “The Chosen,” which depicts the life of Jesus in episodic form. The other is “Sound of Freedom,” the drama in which Jim Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, recounting his efforts to catch child traffickers — a highly fictionalized telling, and one that apparently gets more and more fictional as more revelations and indictments come out about its subject (who has denied all allegations).

As with “Sound of Freedom,” “After Death” ends with a to-the-camera appeal — this time by Gray — to audience members to “play it forward” by purchasing theater tickets for the next person seeking out the movie. And, as before, a helpful QR code is projected onto the screen to direct people to buy those tickets.

Ultimately, “After Death” isn’t for skeptics, but for the believers. It’s meant to comfort people who think there is a heaven, not try to sway the undecided. It’s very certain of what happens when we die — and such certainty isn’t just presumptuous, it’s not particularly interesting as a movie.

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‘After Death’

★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including violent descriptions, some bloody images and drug references. Running time: 108 minutes.