There’s nothing wrong with Ghostbusters: Afterlife at all, apart from its strange reluctance to reference Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig. The one that exercised a lot of bedwetters with its “controversial” cast with a lot of women in it. It wasn’t very good, but not because it starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Patty Tolan and Kate McKinnon. It just wasn’t funny or scary.
They never are, scary I mean, the Ghostbusters films. That’s not really the point. The idea is to deliver lots of likeable knockabout camaraderie and good vibes, which is what Afterlife does, liberally scattering easter eggs referring back to one of the original two movies, but not to the 2016 iteration.
Afterlife to a large extent reworks the original formula as a kids movie. Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd are in it, in top-of-the-bill roles. But the story revolves around Mckenna Grace (mostly) and Finn Wolfhard, as the kids of Coon’s frazzled Disney Mom Callie, who all move out to a big old derelict farm inherited by Callie when her dad, Egon Spengler (originally played by Harold Ramis) – known to locals as the weirdo Dirt Farmer – dies.
Phoebe (Grace), the family egghead, soon works out what grandad Egon was up to on his remote farm growing nothing at all. He was building a gigantic ghostbusting machine designed to trap escaped ghostly evil-doers on the arrival of the impending ghostocalypse, which is of course just around the corner.
And there was Callie thinking that her dad was aloof and had his mind elsewhere because he didn’t love her.
The biggest easter egg of all is the character of Grace’s Phoebe, as near to Harold Ramis’s Egon in looks as hairstyle and boffin glasses can get her, and with a temperament to match.
This is a film in which everyone gets a potential romantic interest. Callie and schoolteacher Grooberson (Rudd), who happens to be something of a boffin himself. Wolfhard’s nerdy Trevor and Celeste O’Connor’s Lucky, hot and sour soup in human form. Phoebe and Podcast (Logan Kim), a funny, precocious and supersmart kid whose podcast on paranormal activity has given him his name.
You are expecting cameos from the original cast and they turn up (as they did more fleetingly in the 2016 movie), though Ramis cannot attend as he died in 2014, so a mishmash of CG is worked up to suggest Egon’s return as a benign ghostly presence. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson all present and correct. And Sigourney Weaver turns up in the closing credits, in an amusing scene between her and Murray.
The director and co-writer is Jason Reitman, son of original director/co-writer Ivan, and he is a sure hand in both roles. This is a very neatly, carefully constructed “getting the gang back together” movie, except this is a shadow, cadet version of the original gang, with the familiar gubbins (the Ghostmobile, the Ecto-1 gun, Ecto goggles and so on) dropped in sparingly. In the same way Reitman (and co-writer Gil Kenan) introduce us to the ghosts as if they were doling out rations – one here, one there, not too many at any one moment.
They are all good – Coon and Rudd, O’Connor and Wolfhard, but the heart of the movie is with Kim and Grace’s characters, most particularly Phoebe, bravest of this entirely fearless gang of kids, who think nothing of getting into a rickety bucket and lowering themselves into a mine, or of chasing after a ghost with equipment they surely don’t know how to work.
That’s really the film’s only flaw. None of it really makes any logical sense, and I’m not talking about the supernatural element. It doesn’t matter very much. This is a tasty cocktail of monsters and ghosts, gadgets and mad electrical arcing held together by smarts, great performances and jokes. Jokes!!
Ghostbusters: Afterlife – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
