‘Another End’ Review: Piero Messina Wastes Gael García Bernal & Renate Reinsve In Apathetic Sci-Fi [Berlinale]

Sal (Gael García Bernal) exists in a limbo — not the religious notion of a space between life and death, but a nonspace. He lives in a large apartment but appears to have no job or vocation. The sprawling metropolis around him is unnamed and uninteresting, a maze of tall buildings home only to the people who cross his path. The man has no hobbies or talents. In fact, there are only three things we know about Sal: he enjoys clubbing, loves his sister, and his wife, Zoe, is dead. 

Piero Messina’s “Another End” picks up sometime after Sal’s bereavement. Unable to cope with seeing his brother waste away at the merciless hands of grief, sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) decides it’s time to marry the personal and the professional and convinces Sal to become one of the many clients of her employer; the film’s titular clinic. The mission of Another End is simple in theory, much less so in practice. A scientific process inputs the memories of a dead person inside a living one, a host best matched to the characteristics of the deceased. When activated, the host is the dead, able to access all the feelings and recollections they experienced when alive. Once asleep, the hosts return to their original selves. 

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The hosting is supposed to be temporary, a few encounters to fulfill the company’s mission of “take your time to say goodbye.” This brief window of time to allow for acclimatization is just one of many issues with the operation at hand. For starters, the whole setup begins by recreating the moment of death, forcing the clients to relive the trauma of the moment when they lost their loved ones. There is a glaring physical mismatch when a client first meets an inhabited host, which leads to a need to reestablish not only the intimacy of touch but to reimagine the spaces — physical and metaphorical — this person now occupies, how limbs fit together in an embrace, how lips find each other in a kiss. There are also all sorts of issues of security. What if an obsessive client decides to find a host in the real world? What if, even worse, a client threatens a host’s physical safety? What is the long-term emotional effect of such an experiment? 

Despite all of the clogs in the operation at the heart of “Another End,” the film’s worst sin is a deeply frustrating lack of curiosity extended not only to its characters but to the world they inhabit and the people who surround them. A subplot involving a Black Mirror-ish technology that allows users to immerse themselves in different realities goes barely investigated, the milky blue eyes of adoptees sparsely invoked to remind us all that these characters are living in a dystopian near-future. The only glance we get at the history of Another End comes in the shape of a clumsily psychological exercise delivered by the only other member of the clinic introduced throughout the film.  

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The host, Ava (Renate Reinsve), is granted the most fleshed-out background but the shallowest, too. She is a depressed sex worker working in a neon-drenched dungeon where older men snake through dodgy corridors, and bodies contort on poles as the beats of techno muffle the sounds of whatever takes place within closed doors. In this, Messina unsubtly establishes a shoddy parallel between hosting and sex work to prod at the morality of selling one’s body for the unilateral satisfaction of others, Ava made object, framed always through the desire of another. 

Gael García Bernal is one of the film’s few trumps, an actor who beautifully commands yearning — and what is grief if not yearning? Still, there is little the Mexican actor can do when trapped within the confinements of a story that knows not what to do with itself apart from serving its own premise. Bernal does what he can with the precious few moments when Messina lets the camera linger on Sal’s rugged face, contorted with pain and exhausted from guilt. The actor finds a fitting partner in Reinsve, whose natural playfulness as Zoe stands in stark contrast to the reserved demeanor of the grief-stricken widower. 

With “Another End,” Messina unites one of the most gifted actors of the last two decades with one of the most gifted of the last two years to venture into one of the most fertile territories of any creative practice, the questioning of life and death, body and soul, presence and absence. It is almost unbelievable to see it result in an apathetic exercise of low-fi sci-fi that drags its way toward an eye-rollingly predictable twist. By then, patience has long run out, leaving in its place only the bitter taste of weariness. [D+]