THE HEREAFTER
2025 · 21m
Directed by Ryan Noufer
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
A terminally ill teen wants her ashes spread with her late mother's, but her father plans a burial in a 'Selfie Casket' that lets the dead keep posting to social media.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Selfie Casket is exactly the kind of premise that makes you recoil and then can't stop thinking about it—death-posting as grief theater, which is so brazenly stupid it somehow becomes the most honest thing about how we mourn now. Noufer's actually willing to let the absurdity breathe without winking at the audience, which is harder and rarer than it looks.
The film sits in productive tension with contemporary meme-death aesthetics while maintaining a classical throughline about father-daughter reconciliation and maternal absence; the tonal control—never letting the social media conceit overwhelm the genuine ache underneath—shows a director conscious of form and restraint.
The decision to play the Selfie Casket concept completely straight, without a single moment of ironic distance, is what sells it; that commitment transforms what could've been a SNL sketch into something that actually lands the grief, and you can feel it most in how the camera sits with the daughter's face when she realizes what her father is doing.
Reviews
Final Girl Presents THE HEREAFTER Olive, a terminally ill teen, wants her ashes spread with her late mother's. However, Olive's father wants her to be buried in a Selfie Casket - a product that allows the dead to keep posting to their social media from beyond the grave.