Writer/director Serena Dc calls herself an “investigative filmmaker,” and in Beyond the Grave she examines death, but in particular what happens during and after death from the perspective that the human body has a separate spirit that leaves the body at death.  The film consists primarily of a series of interviews with a wide variety of individuals whose work intersects with death. We meet a “death doula” and end-of-life coach who prepares people for their own moment of death. She also claims one of her earlier clients still meets her and helps her help others transition. Serena DC speaks with individuals who have had near-death or clinical death experiences, and allows them to report on what they believe they experienced. She visits a lab in Arizona in which bodies are cryogenically stored to await resurrection once the technology exists to restore life.

The film and its interviewees have a number of presuppositions about human ontology, and how one receives this film is perhaps rooted in whether or not you believe in a soul or spirit or in the survival of the human personality after death.

Beyond the Grave takes an interesting turn when Serena Dc announces, “I’m not ready to die just yet. So I’m going to go experience the next best thing.” The next best thing to dying yourself is apparently visiting the Rhode Island house on which the film The Conjuring is based with Andrea Perron, one of the girls who grew up in the house and was represented in the movie. In real life, Perron has written a trilogy of books about living in the haunted farmhouse. As a fan of the film, I was fascinated to see this approach to thinking about death, but it reframes the film as something less of a scientific approach to the topic. Dc and Perron discuss the afterlife, both different existences (heaven, hell, etc.) but also hauntings. Ken DeCosta and his paranormal investigation team then arrives to explore the farmhouse for the presence of paranormal activity. While I want to be as respectful as possible, it can be hard to take some of this seriously.

Towards the end of the film, one of the people being interviewed notes, “This is all speculation – none of us really knows.”  Serena DC then concludes “When our body dies, our soul moves through a process that can only be called euphoria,” except, as the previous commentor notes – even that is speculation. No one knows.  This is all supposition and belief, nothing inherently provable or even able to be specifically documented.

Beyond the Grave is not a horror film; it is a documentary, but not the documentary it claims to be. Instead, what is documented is what a variety of people think about and believe happens after death, and whether or not they believe there is a non-corporeal part of an individual that survives bodily death. For this reviewer, that was where the film’s interest lies: seeing people discuss their beliefs. Other than that, I do not feel I learned a good deal about death and what comes after. But like the man said, no one knows anyway.