Preparation for the Next Life

The Geography of the Discarded

In the vast, churning machinery of the American city, there are gears that turn silently, lubricated by the sweat of those designed to remain invisible. We walk past them daily—the silhouette scrubbing a window, the bicycle delivery rider in the rain, the figure huddled in a surplus army jacket. Cinema often treats these lives as background texture, mere scenery for the protagonists of the middle class. But in *Preparation for the Next Life*, director Bing Liu does not just look at these people; he looks *through* them, granting us a devastatingly intimate vantage point from the margins of empire.

Liu, whose Oscar-nominated documentary *Minding the Gap* revealed a profound gift for empathetic observation, makes his narrative feature debut here with a transition so seamless it feels less like a shift in medium and more like a change in lens aperture. He adapts Atticus Lish’s novel not as a traditional melodrama, but as a sensory immersion into the lives of two people who have been chewed up and spat out by the very systems they serve.

The film anchors itself on Aishe (a revelatory Sebiye Behtiyar), a Uyghur immigrant moving like a ghost through the labyrinthine underground economy of New York’s Chinatown. She is a study in survival—her body a tool for labor, her eyes always scanning for the exit, for the threat of deportation. Into her orbit crashes Skinner (Fred Hechinger), a jagged, traumatized veteran of the Iraq War who carries the desert’s violence in his twitchy, unmoored gait.

Visually, Liu and cinematographer Ante Cheng reject the polished gloss of the rom-com in favor of a suffocating, tactile reality. The camera lingers on the grime of industrial kitchens, the fluorescent hum of a basement apartment, and the chaotic neon smear of the city at night. There is a documentary-like patience in the way the film observes labor; we feel the weight of the trays Aishe carries and the exhaustion in her bones. This "texture of truth" prevents the film’s central romance from feeling like a Hollywood contrivance. When Aishe and Skinner connect, it isn't a meet-cute; it is the collision of two falling bodies finding friction in the freefall.

The film’s emotional core is best exemplified in a sequence that subverts the traditional courtship montage. Instead of flowers and chocolates, we watch a strange, physical competition between the two—a test of strength and endurance that feels like a mating dance for the damaged. In the blue-bruised light of a nightclub, their connection feels frantic, a desperate grasp for humanity in a world that denies them dignity. Hechinger, whose performance vibrates with the dangerous unpredictability of a live wire, plays Skinner not as a hero, but as a casualty. He is the discarded by-product of American foreign policy, just as Aishe is the fugitive victim of global geopolitics.

If the narrative occasionally buckles under the weight of its own tragedy—drifting, perhaps intentionally, into a third act that feels as aimless as its protagonist—it is a forgivable flaw. The script by Martyna Majok resists the urge to "fix" these characters. There are no magical legal loopholes for Aishe, no sudden cures for Skinner’s PTSD. The tragedy of the film is not that they fail to find love, but that love alone is insufficient armor against the crushing reality of their circumstances.

*Preparation for the Next Life* is a difficult, bruising work that refuses to offer the audience the comfort of a clean resolution. It suggests that for some, the American Dream is not a promise of prosperity, but merely a waiting room—a purgatory where you endure the indignities of the present while hoping, quietly, that the next life might be kinder.