Entertainment

Talking to the naked and the dead

There’s a scene in which a pervy police officer sneakily cops a feel of Christina Ricci’s very nude and very cold body that pretty much sums up Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo’s debut feature, the unnervingly creepy “After.Life.”

I mean, the writer-director couldn’t possibly be serious about a movie in which a mortician named Eliot addresses the corpses he’s fixing up as “you people” — and gently complains they’re “in denial” about being dead.

Eliot is played by the great Liam Neeson with considerably more restraint than his concurrent role as the Kraken-unleashing Zeus in “Clash of the Titans.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that “After.Life” isn’t going to appeal more to followers of Mr. Skin than fans of, say, Neeson’s “Kinsey.”

Eliot explains to his captive audience that he has the gift to speak with the dead.

The film also allows for the possibility that he’s a quiet psychotic who is ushering people into the afterlife. (The “dot” in the title has no apparent significance except to distinguish it from similarly titled movies.)

That’s the suspicion of Ricci’s Anna, a schoolteacher who ended up on Eliot’s slab after suffering a supposedly fatal accident following an argument with her boyfriend, Paul (Justin Long).

The weepy Paul, who is blamed for the accident by Anna’s handicapped mother (Celia Weston), becomes concerned after one of her 11-year-old students says he’s seen Anna standing up.

Most of the film takes place in the funeral home’s prep room, where Eliot lovingly fingers the tools of his trade while reciting variations on Kubler-Ross (commonly known as the five stages of grief) at great length to Anna.

Anna, who periodically leaves her slab for perfunctory attempts to escape from the locked room, is wearing only a bright red slip until Eliot cuts it off with a pair of scissors.

At one point, Paul tells the cops he may have gotten a call from her.

“Collect or long-distance?” he’s asked.

With jokes like that, I don’t think we’re expected to take “After.Life” any more seriously than Ricci’s last extended (near) nude role in the immortal “Black Snake Moan.” That one was more fun.