For some, it’s a welcome solace. For others, it’s a heinous burden. But for the protagonists of Mali Elfman’s feature directorial debut, it’s a promise. To know the date, the time, even the means of one’s own death, on one’s own terms and to know that this physical death need not necessarily mean the death of one’s consciousness? In Next Exit, Rose (Katie Parker) and Teddy (Rahul Kohli) see a research scientist’s extraordinary discovery that the afterlife is real and that spirits can travel between their world and ours as an opportunity. They take a cross-country road trip from NYC to San Francisco to participate in a controversial study, ending their earthly existences so their passing can be tracked and monitored. For her, it’s a way to make right the wrongs she feels she’s committed; for him, it’s a way to make something of himself, after a life of mounting regrets. For the audience, it’s an unholy chore.
Next Exit is such a woefully misjudged hodgepodge of stale contrivances and banal stabs at poignancy and profundity one almost wishes the pair would just get it over with and wrap this thing up in a snappy 15 minutes. Following a pair of suicidal strangers on a days-long death trip likely wouldn’t be much fun under any circumstances, but Elfman’s bizarrely insistent on making it precisely that: fun. Thus, material that has the potential to plumb two complex, fundamentally conflicted characters plots a wayward course through mediocre comedy, random encounters with colorful strangers and a glut of painfully earnest, life-affirming scenes of learning how to really live. It’s all so cheesy, it could at least have the grace to be original, yet it’s anything but. Elfman’s ideas are the stuff of any number of existing indie rom-coms, early-‘00s emo dramedies and sickly-sweet This Is Us subplots.
The issues plaguing this film are multitudinous, covering nearly every element of its production and presentation. The dialogue is mostly a string of implausibly quick (though uniformly feeble) quips en route to cringeworthy emotional revelations. The plot is wafer-thin and thus predictable down to the last detail and what minor deviations it takes from its formula inevitably work only to further bolster its formulaicness. Artistically, it’s so overwhelmingly middling one may begin to wish for something outright egregious just to interrupt the stylistic inertia – a wretchedly ugly composition perhaps, or a horribly inappropriate soundtrack cut. But Elfman cares too much about her quasi-adolescent soul-searching, her wannabe wisdom that she clearly wouldn’t dare spoil it with a bit of actual, genuine innovation. The only thing truly egregious about Next Exit is Karen Gillan’s laughable Elizabeth Holmes impression as the research scientist, though she’s barely even in the film at all.
And yet it’s not a total write-off. By all means, it should have been, what with the seemingly endless assembly line of faults and flaws weighing it down. But Elfman has happened, whether willingly or not, upon quite the blessing, like a benevolent spirit sent from another world to help save her film from utter ignominy. Rahul Kohli just transpires to be exactly the right actor to play Teddy at exactly the right time in his career to make him a viable choice for a low-budget production with semi-mainstream aspirations. Anyone who’s seen Kohli in any of his previous projects, mostly TV shows such as iZombie and The Haunting of Bly Manor will appreciate his ability to automatically improve the quality of whatever that project is, solely due to his presence. He’s got a lot to improve here and quite a task on his hands whether he pulls it off or not, given some of the dialogue he’s been saddled with. Yet Kohli is entirely up to that task, finding exactly the right tone and energy for Teddy and far transcending the work of anybody else involved with Next Exit. His charisma, his gift for mimicking spontaneity, his emotional range, his remarkable believability when playing drunk (something that trips up even the best of performers) – everything about Kohli is just so good he takes an otherwise borderline-unwatchable film and makes it, of all things, genuinely watchable.
The trouble remains, however, that Next Exit has pretty much nothing else going for it and that, even when Kohli’s center stage, the standard of the material is still very low indeed. He’s surrounded by actors either unwilling to match his elevated level of performance or incapable of it, reading lines that sound like they were written by a moody 13-year-old, in a film that thinks it’s far better than it really is and is thus unable to commit to being the film it really is. And once you’ve taken notice of its contrivance, or its corniness, or its insincerity, it’s impossible to go back. Whether or not there’s life after death isn’t for any of us to know, alas, yet whether or not there’s a good film in Next Exit after you’ve spotted its fundamental and manifold problems certainly is, so know this: there isn’t.
Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
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