124 min | PG-13 | November 19, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
A broke single mother and her two kids inherit a rundown Oklahoma farm from a grandfather they never met. The grandfather is a dead Ghostbuster, and the soil is full of demons. The movie spends its energy decorating a grave instead of telling a story.
Callie and her two teenagers move to a dying Oklahoma farm town after inheriting the estate of a grandfather they never knew. The grandfather is Egon Spengler. The kids find proton packs in the barn and a ghost trap under the floorboards. Phoebe, the granddaughter, reconstructs the family legacy as a buried apocalypse stirs back to life under the soil. The film presents itself as a continuation of the 1984 comedy. It is really a memorial service for it.
Mckenna Grace plays Phoebe with a flat, deadpan precision that makes her the only character with a pulse. She delivers bad puns and physics lectures in the same affectless register and sells both. Finn Wolfhard plays Trevor as a generic teenage boy with a crush and little else to do. Carrie Coon plays Callie, the broke single mother, with more weariness than the script earns her. Paul Rudd plays Gary Grooberson, a seismologist turned summer-school teacher, and coasts on charm because the part is thin. Logan Kim as Podcast and Celeste O’Connor as Lucky fill out the kid ensemble as functions rather than people.
Jason Reitman directs the film his father Ivan made, and the reverence shows in every frame. He shoots rural Oklahoma in warm Amblin golds, all wheat fields and bicycles and sunset silhouettes lifted from Spielberg. The script he wrote with Gil Kenan treats artifacts from the original like museum pieces and pauses to admire each one. The climax leans on CGI to recreate a face from the 1984 picture, and the seams show in the dead eyes and rubbery motion. The famous theme cues swell on schedule to tell the audience when to feel something. The craft is competent and the purpose is sentimental.
Bill Murray returns as Peter Venkman late and briefly, and his deadpan has curdled into obligation. The film works hardest when it forgets the franchise and lets Phoebe be a strange, lonely kid in a haunted house. Those stretches suggest a smaller and better movie about grief and inheritance. Then the proton packs come out and the nostalgia machine takes over. Afterlife mistakes recognition for emotion. It hands the audience the artifacts of something it loved and assumes the loving will do the rest.