Undefined city, unknown period.

Aeterna is a company that makes it possible to program the memories of the dead into people who decide to sell short paths of their life and time to this experience. They are not unknown but although they have another body they are exactly like dead people.

If someone wants to take more time, they can use this service: they will have a few meetings to be able to grieve.

Delivered and collected in canvas boxes, these people have their own lives, interspersed with these breaks: they do it for money but not only that.

Sal's sister, who works in Aeterna, advises him to use a temporary alternative to Zoe, whom he lost in a car accident.

At first he is against it, then following an attempted suicide, he follows his sister's advice. A stranger arrives in the house who is, however, in manner, behavior, character, and memories exactly like her companion.

Somewhat wary at first Sal becomes engrossed in the dating to the point of asking his sister to extend the period, although this is not allowed by protocol. He also begins to follow the alter woman Zoe to find out who she is and what leads her to do all this.

Nothere becomes AnothereND, that is, from a not here comes another possibility, another end, which, however, is not of the deceased but of those left behind in the pain of loss.

In addition to wondering whether this will be possible especially with the explosion of artificial intelligence with which everything could be programmable; in addition to wondering when it is ethical and formative to procrastinate a loss especially in a culture that denies even in language the word death, the question remains whether it is ever possible to bring back what was or whether it could be believable in everyday life that a different body could represent a life that no longer exists..

In a dystopian architecture accompanied by multimedia compositions, bodies of various natures wander about: in addition to the merely living, one can meet tenants and landlords, intermittent lives, amid sorrow, resignation, prostitution.

One can buy presence packages of those who embody in their living bodies, in their real and not prefabricated presence, the psyche of the deceased grafted into the body of the rented.

With Sion Sono's Noriko's dinner table and Lanthimos's Alps, the theme of grieving was dealt with, but in a different way: here there were no rented bodies with software programming of memories, there were people playing the part of the deceased, at the request of family members, relatives, acquaintances, out of extreme loneliness and beyond.

In Another End between despair and the possibility of deferring grief induces a dependence on life over death, deferring even the only certainty, inevitable, the only truth that cannot be falsified, the only security that cannot be doubted: death.

What respect for the deceased transported to a reality no longer his own, to another time and a foreign body?

A soul that does not meet peace even after death because someone can buy it back to a new life, so much for euthanasia!

The choice to lead part-time lives for money or to pass the unbearable time of life seems perhaps the most sophisticated element of the film's existential concept.

If life is a servitude, punctuated by love and death, the restlessness produced by the estrangement of death itself can induce dependence on the further consumption of others' lives for one's own benefit: a market of fragmented, dissected existences, enslaved to the profit of the illusion of deferring the inevitable above all to the exclusive service of those who can buy the product.

The economic power of bringing back to life, albeit partially, incentivizes the market for the subtraction of discomfort, trauma, acceptance, defeat. The Promethean hubris of governing the ungovernable to produce the market of deferred, installmentalized, deferred death to induce the need to enslave and control the customer even on the subject of death and its eventual procrastination.

A dark, claustrophobic film with gray tones and intrusive music, with a crescendo ending, sophisticated and surprising.

130 minutes of disquiet, reflection, questions and attempts at answers.

We need to start considering the drafting of a living will that goes beyond the mere expression of the will in situations of incapacity, where it includes that of not authorizing the "explantation and re-implantation" of organs of remembrance into other bodies enslaved to despair, the market, estrangement and unawareness. Awakening could be fatal.

16-Mar-2024 by