"Dragonfly" (2002)

When atheist and emergency room doctor Joe Darrow loses his beloved wife, he is devastated that she is gone forever. But then, slowly, he starts seeing things, witnessing things, that insinuate that she's still around and trying to communicate. Is he going mad, or is his wife trying to speak to him from beyond the grave? If the latter, what is she trying to say?

This is a cool movie, romantically portrayed and intelligently written. It studies the gray shades between the white and black of life and death, it considers the idea of an afterlife analytically, and it does my favorite thing a movie can do: show the gray shades between sanity and madness. Aside from these rather commonly good traits, it was brilliant at two points. First, the conclusion fit together and made sense. There was a message worth declaring from beyond the grave, and it was effectively (though not efficiently) delivered. So many paranormal movies end with a special effects sequence or with anti-climatic answers. In this movie, the answers fit. Second, it is a study of the idea of the afterlife with an entirely religiously-neutral point of view. It's not considered a binary choice between Christianity and Atheism, but a complex question with a vast array of possible answers.

I respect and enjoyed this movie. It was dramatic, analytically paranormal, and worth seeing.