★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Things are looking up when you can have a movie release as exceptional as “Twinless,” followed by another must-see in the same week. But that’s the case with “Preparation for the Next Life,” an unlikely but unforgettable love story that sneaks up and floors you.
Beginning with delicacy and ending in devastation, the film is the fiction debut of Chinese-American director Bing Liu, best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary “Minding the Gap,” about skateboarding, toxic masculinity and domestic violence with Liu as himself.
Reduced to its essentials, “Preparation for the Next Life” chronicles the unstable relationship between an undocumented woman and a U.S. Army vet with mental health issues. But Liu is always about what happens when we look below the surface.
Set in New York City, the film lets us into the first stirrings of improbable connection between Aishe (Sebiye Behtiyar), an immigrant who’s part of China’s persecuted Uyghur ethnic minority, and Skinner (Fred Hechinger), a white soldier whose PTSD seems impervious to medication and much knowledge of a world outside his own.
She’s developed a thick skin, after backbreaking work in Chinatown kitchens in an effort to achieve legal status. He’s just returned from serving in the Middle East and is still trying to shake off the unshakable trauma. No online dating service would ever define these two as a perfect match.
They don’t either. But something draws them together. They pound beers in bars and indulge in a push-up contest to prove who’s more macho. An awkward dance is a literal microcosm of the pieces that don’t fit. He’s the softboy giving to lashing out in fury. She’s the tough customer who thinks vulnerability is something you hide to survive.
And yet we find them irresistible and hold them close. Liu wants us to since Aishe is partly drawn from his own mother who also immigrated to the U.S. and fell for an American. But there’s no sugarcoating in his film, as notions of a romantic future become more intense as they grow more impossible.
None of this movie would be possible without the miraculous performances of the two leads. In her screen debut, Behtiyar shows the toll of diminished expectations on the still-luminous Aishe. But she also radiates a resilience and a need to find purpose in this life, not the next.
Hechinger, already one of our best young actors in roles as diverse as “Eighth Grade,” “The White Lotus” and “Gladiator II,” delivers his most powerful and sensitive performance yet as a troubled boy who wonders if maturity is even in his reach.
Liu and his two sublime young stars have made a film that gets under your skin.
“Preparation for the Next Life,” is found gold. Act accordingly.