Death Becomes Her

Rating: 8/10 (3 December 2005)

Just your average boy meets girl, boy meets corpse, girl nearly loses boy to corpse story. The story begins in a vaguely Victorian London in which everyone and everything is in muted shades of grey, mauve and blue that suggest, well, a corpse. The wonderful irony underlying this film is that after Victor is spirited away by the vampish corpse bride, the land of dead turns out to be as full blooded and colourful as the land of the living is wan and repressed. The underworld is also the setting of a number of great sight gags that recall Beetlejuicemy favourites are the Napoleonic soldiers with cannon ball sized holes in their torsos (you can see the wine running down after it's been swallowed) and the jittery severed head (French, of course).
Considering how rollicking this underworld is, the ending in which Victor decides to return to the world above is inevitably a bit disappointing. There's a predictable conservatism to so many of these films in which an ordinary hero or heroine is offered a glimpse of some fantastic alternative world only to opt for everyday reality after all (Splash, the mermaid picture from the eighties with Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks, is the only exception I can think of offhand to this general rule). I also found Emily's fate (she metamorphoses into a flock of butterflies) somewhat of a letdown as its sentimentality doesn't really match up with the jazzy black comedy tone of the rest of the film. If Emily was in fact stranded in limbo until Victor came along, the company of her cheerfully decomposing pals made it a jolly sort of limbowhy not let Emily go back there if she couldn't have Victor?
Still, these are relatively minor objections, and on the whole The Corpse Bride is one of the most unexpected, interesting films of 2005.