In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.
They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.
The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.
On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.
But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.
Next Exit
Not rated. 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
