Coco and 4 Other TV Shows & Movies Where Characters Find Themselves in Another World
A boy trying to unravel the mystery of a curse, a woman who goes to heaven by mistake, and an experiment about death.
The expression memento mori will never be abolished, unless immortality is invented, which currently has a place only in cinema. Much more often, cinema deals with the transition to the world of the dead or other parallel worlds.
1. Coco, 2017
12-year-old Mexican boy Miguel dreams of becoming a real musician, like his late idol Ernesto de la Cruz. The catch is that music is forbidden in Miguel's family because of an old curse that his grandmother never stops reminding him of.
One day, as the Day of the Dead festivities begin across the country, Miguel himself is accidentally transported to the afterlife, where he will not only meet the legendary Ernesto, but also learn the roots of the family curse.
2. Dead Man, 1995
Blake is assigned to work in one of the towns of the Wild West, where he goes. When he arrives, the man learns that no one is waiting for him there, but what's worse, he gets a bullet right in the chest.
And so Blake, who has passed half of his earthly life, gets closer and closer to the world of ghosts with every minute of screen time.
Dead Man is not so much a movie about the world of the dead as it is an illustration of the transition to the next world. A kind of one-way journey that the director films in such a way that the fine line between reality and the spiritual world becomes imperceptibly thin.
3. The Good Place, 2016-2020
Sales manager and just not a very good person, Eleanor suddenly dies and ends up in heaven. You can get there by accumulating the required number of points for good deeds on Earth.
Eleanor understands perfectly well that she ended up in the Good Place by mistake, but of course she will not tell anyone about it. However, with her arrival in the idealistic world where everyone is happy and kind, inexplicable catastrophes begin to occur.
4. The Boy and the Heron, 2023
15-year-old Mahito has a hard time accepting his mother's death. Even after his father packs up and takes his son away from the noisy cities to a small settlement, Mahito continues to miss her.
One day, he meets a talking heron who takes the boy to an old, empty tower and promises that there he will finally be able to meet his mother.
Hayao Miyazaki's new creation largely continues the topic of Spirited Away, once again inviting viewers to immerse themselves in another world, this time inhabited by the ghosts of the dead, flocks of pelicans and even a king parrot.
5. Enter the Void, 2009
Oscar, through whose eyes we see everything that happens on screen, lives with his sister Linda in a small apartment in Tokyo. One day he finds himself in a bar during a police raid and is fatally wounded in the chaos.
Then Oscar's spirit leaves his body and begins to float above the city, watching the characters and events of the movie from above.
Director Gaspar Noé calls his creation a psychedelic melodrama. Enter the Void is a great experiment in form and narration, an attempt to show the transition of the human soul into the world of the dead from the first person.