Drake Doremus gives Emilia Clarke two possible lives and two possible men, and has plainly chosen one before the hour is out. Clarke, Jack Farthing and a live band earn some goodwill; the rest is a nicely lit London nobody lives in.
Drake Doremus writes and directs Next Life, a 112-minute romance with a science-fiction conceit so light you could miss it. Ivy (Emilia Clarke) is a woman in London with two men in front of her, Diego (Édgar Ramírez) and Noah (Jack Farthing), and instead of making her choose, the film shows us both lives, cutting between them as they run. It is a decent idea, and Doremus has built a career on films about two people in a room, so he ought to be the man to make it. He gets about half of it right. The half he gets wrong is the half the whole film is standing on.
Clarke is the reason to keep watching. She plays Ivy without the big eyes and the pleading that have been asked of her elsewhere; this Ivy listens, mostly, and the camera stays on her face while other people talk. Farthing is the surprise. Noah is written as the man you would not bet on, a bit careful, a bit dull on paper, and Farthing plays him as somebody who has noticed this about himself and decided not to apologise for it. Their scenes together are small and funny and feel found rather than written, which is the Doremus method at its best.
The music is the other thing that works. Dan Romer’s score is sparing and mostly lets the band play, and the band is where the film comes alive, with Femi Koleoso as a musician called Femi driving it from the back. There is a night in the club, early on, where Marianne Bakke holds a long take on Clarke watching the stage with the light coming off the brass, and we found ourselves leaning in the way she does. It is the one time the film makes London feel like a place anyone actually lives.
Then there is Diego. Ramírez is a capable actor stranded in a part that is all surface: the assured one, the man with the better flat and the easier charm. He and Clarke do not strike anything off each other. Scenes meant to be heady come across as two people being polite. Because that strand never catches, the film’s central question, which life she should want, stops being a question. Doremus has told us the answer by about the forty-minute mark and then spends another hour pretending he has not.
The craft does not help as much as it should. Bakke shoots in shallow focus and warm, low light, so flats, bars and streets blur into the same honeyed haze, and the two lives, which ought to look and feel distinct, become hard to tell apart without a glance at who is in the bed. Avner Shiloah cuts between the strands on a mood rather than a beat, which keeps things soft when the idea wanted edges. Nobody in either life appears to have a job, a landlord or a bus to catch. The whole thing feels chosen from a catalogue of nice London lives, and that is what most got between us and caring.
A midwife (Laura Guest) and a Doctor Akram (Adil Akram) turn up in one of the strands, and we will say nothing about which or why. We will say that the second half asks the structure to carry a weight it has not been built for.
The method here is two actors, a loose script and a camera close enough to catch them thinking, and it works when something real stands between the people. Next Life has the method without the pressure.
Worth an evening if Clarke and Farthing talking in a kitchen and a live band in a small room sound like enough. For most people it will not be. Watch it at home, where the softness is less of a problem and you can go back to the music.
