Next Exit was reviewed out of the Tribeca Film Festival, where it made its world premiere.
Watching Next Exit is heartbreaking, if only because lead actors Rahul Kohli and Katie Parker pour their souls into a movie that doesn’t work. It’s a bland hodgepodge of genres and ideas — a haphazard comedy-horror-drama about suicide, the afterlife, and reconciling past traumas — all wrapped in a tale of strangers on a road trip, who sound less like real people and more like film school first drafts in dire need of workshopping. Where it begins and where it ends up are totally disconnected, and its pit stops along the way are rarely more cohesive.
After a haunting opening scene in a dim bedroom, in which a young boy witnesses lights and shapes in the darkness which eventually take the form of his late father, this genuinely intriguing introduction pulls out to reveal an experiment run by Dr. Stevenson (Karen Gillan), a famous scientist whose claims of discovering the afterlife have rocked society to its core — or so we’re told. News broadcasts and other indirect streams of information hint at the wider ripple effects of learning about life after death, but these are more distant implications than dramatizations.
The focus soon shifts to a pair of wayward strangers, Teddy (Kohli) and Rose (Parker), who, after getting a call from Stevenson’s Life Beyond institute, pack up their lives in New York and begin making their way to San Francisco in the hopes of being her next test subjects. As luck would have it, a mix up at the car rental service hired by Life Beyond turns them into reluctant co-passengers. They take an immediate dislike to one another, involving personal jabs that would make you think they once defrauded each other’s families, but their sudden and charged mutual distaste is merely an outcome of the script needing them to start at rom com point A before ending up at rom com point B.
The premise is further bolstered by the discovery that some people — Rose being one among them — have the ability to see ghosts, and hers takes the form of a shadow figure who appears occasionally in mirrors at various motels. However, these ideas surrounding death and the supernatural quickly fade into the background, returning only when the road trip needs some shaking up. The problem is that practically everything in the film, from Teddy and Rose’s interactions, to the folks they meet along the way, to the experiences about which they eventually open up, don’t require this larger premise about discovering the afterlife, or being willing test subjects in an assisted suicide. The backdrop oozes with storytelling potential, but it isn’t just irrelevant to most of the story’s happenings. In a few major ways, it proves to be completely antithetical.
Rarely do Teddy and Rose behave like people burdened or depressed enough to want to end their lives, and while this may sound like a broad truism — in real life, you never know who’s going through it — their propensities for suicide and self-destruction don’t manifest even in intimate, private moments, until the question stares them in the face, quite late into the movie’s 103-minute runtime. En route to them finally feeling like people who belong within this story, they simply attack each other with verbal barbs that have little external or internal motive (beyond the movie maintaining the appearance of an adversarial tone).
To make matters worse, the film’s framing device, about the discovery of consciousness after death, takes a sledgehammer to its own attempted themes of fatalism and its suicidal characters. Their past actions and experiences make them want to end things, but the story’s own premise is about how their deaths wouldn’t actually result in any meaningful end or closure, a bizarre paradox the script never attempts to reconcile.
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This thoughtlessness around the larger premise is matched by a similar thoughtlessness around the use of metaphors. Rose, for instance, goes as far as explaining the underlying meaning of the figure she sees, in no uncertain terms, but it factors into the story so infrequently that it may as well not be part of it at all. Beyond a point, it’s a metaphor only for itself, since the lingering emotional hole it represents ends up confronted in more direct and literal ways. Similarly, Teddy — who has no such visions to begin with — ends up on a linear path of confronting the secrets of his past. In the process, Next Exit often feels like an idea that germinated without any supernatural flare (and would have succeeded without it), but ends up emotionally dulled and tonally confused by its many half-formed ideas.
There is a clear and present sadness lurking beneath Teddy and Rose, which Kohli and Parker seem to access in every scene, but director Mali Elfman frequently fails to do the same. The story comes from a genuine place of regret and of confronting the past, but it’s the performances that speak this language. The filmmaking seldom does, trudging along from detour to detour as it makes fleeting references to the many big ideas that ought to inform its central premise. Instead, the result is a film that, were it to lose its supernatural bent, would play out much the same way — albeit, perhaps, with the same aesthetic plainness and penchant for completely inorganic human interactions. At one point, Teddy mocks Rose by asking “How do you make suicide pretentious?” and it’s hard not to ask the same of Next Exit.
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Next Exit Review - IGN
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