"Next Exit" - Tribeca Film Fest Review
Mali Elfman’s directorial debut, Next Exit, would be right at home as an episode of Black Mirror. The film is set in the near-ish future where a company called Life Beyond has discovered that an afterlife exists and is visible to a select few gifted people. Life Beyond is run by an Elizabeth Holmes-type, Dr. Stevenson (Karen Gillan), who believes that death is simply another beginning. In her lab in San Francisco, she offers people the option to painlessly commit suicide and enter the afterlife.
Across the country in New York City are Rose (Katie Parker) and Teddy (Rahul Kohli). They’re two strangers who apply and are accepted to Dr. Stevenson’s program. Their paths cross because they both elect to drive rather than fly to their appointment with Life Beyond. Rose doesn’t have a credit card and Teddy doesn’t have a valid driver’s license, so the rental car company won’t honor their separate reservations. The two begrudgingly realize that each has what the other is missing, and if they want to make it to San Francisco they’re each other’s only hope.
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Rose and Teddy, like many other people, choose to go to Life Beyond because they’re depressed and frustrated with how their lives are going. They see the afterlife as a clean slate where they can right past wrongs and start over again. As Rose and Teddy make their way across the country, their conversations drift between the mundane and the existential. The film is both a rumination on mental health and a quintessential road trip flick. Along the journey, Rose and Teddy meet three different characters meant to represent political, mystical, and religious outlooks on what happens after death.
Parker and Kohli’s chemistry is magic, and they provide the sort of career-defining performances that will surely make their names more well-known. It’s their ability to command every inch of the screen that makes the looseness in the plot easy to overlook. There are so many grand concepts at play within Next Exit being discussed between Rose and Teddy that the film resembles a depressed sci-fi version of Before Sunrise. Swap the streets of Vienna for the barren highways of the United States, maintain the romance, and you’re halfway there. For most of the movie, Teddy and Rose are in their car talking about their lives, their fears, and their beliefs. Those expecting a grand science fiction story will be disappointed by the smallness of the film.
An undercurrent of horror runs through Next Exit, and it’s mostly shown through a few jump scares. These moments weaken the strengths of the film, and the over-reliance on romance at the end is disappointing. Overall, Next Exit is like all road trips: the journey is more interesting than the destination.
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