"After.Life" is a horror movie without the courage of its grisly convictions. Without much in the way of convictions at all, actually.

Liam Neeson is Eliot Deacon, a suburban undertaker who has a special relationship with his deceased clientele. When Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci), a local schoolteacher fresh from a nasty car crash, comes to on his embalming table, she naturally wonders what's up. "You're dead," Eliot gently informs her. But Anna — struck by the fact that she is, after all, still wondering things — begs to disagree. This only makes Eliot pissy. "You all say the same thing," he snaps. And then, pricelessly: "Maybe you should rest now."

Eliot claims to have "a gift" for communicating with the dead. This might have made a nice little movie — 90 minutes of high-toned back-and-forth about the nature of death and life and what have you. But Eliot's connection with Anna isn't spiritual — it involves gestures and expressions and tedious stretches of argumentation. And if Anna is dead, as Eliot endlessly contends, how come she can see her breath on a mirror? And why is a little boy looking in through a window able to see her walking around? Is Eliot a serial killer? This would, of course, have made an even better movie, entertaining us with Eliot's creepy nocturnal expeditions in search of new victims to cold-cock and drag back to the mortuary for unspeakable attentions in his basement body shop.

But first-time feature director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo has nothing so prosaic as entertainment on her mind. What she does have in mind is anybody's guess, since the movie dithers in pointless ambiguity for most of its excessive run-time. Presumably she was going for something more thoughtful than a conventional fright flick. But the fright-flick conventions to which the picture continually alludes — the fake-out shocks, the hallway lights that suddenly start flicking off in advancing sequence — are an unignorable distraction from whatever more rarefied purpose may have been intended.

Neeson is no help, either, floating through the picture with the conked demeanor of a man who's suffered an accidental self-lobotomy. And while Ricci does her best to liven things up — by being naked, mainly — it's hard to muster much interest in a character who blows a wide-open chance of escape by apparently attempting it in self-imposed slow-motion. Justin Long is on hand, too, an intermittent annoyance yapping around the edges of the action (if that's the word) as Anna's distraught boyfriend.

And then there's the boy noted above — one of Anna's concerned students, a little guy named Jack (Chandler Canterbury). He's the movie's most intriguing character — a brooding voyeur who has a special connection of his own to the icky Eliot. Together, these two suggest a third possibility for a more robustly engaging film. It might not turn out to be art, but at least it wouldn't be this.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Date Night" and "Who Do You Love," also new in theaters this week.

Check out everything we've got on "After.Life."

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.