As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to make a go of things without papers. As I type Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are rounding up people all over the USA, so this film, shot in late 2024 and early 2025, couldn’t be more timely.
Director Bing Liu is best known for his documentaries, All These Sons and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap. He seems keen to jump properly into fiction here, with his lush, colourful shooting style romanticising the underbelly of New York life, though his way of working with his actors – script, exploratory rehearsal and then a free-and-easy approach to wandering off book during shooting – gets relaxed and documentary-like performances out of his two leads.
There are other names in this, but to all intents and purposes it’s a two-hander, with Sebiye Behtiyar playing the Uyghur migrant – an outcast even among her fellow Chinese – and Fred Hechinger as the ex-soldier she meets one night. Behtiyar has done nothing on screen before but is a complete find, playing Aishe as a clever, watchful, amused and determined young woman. Hechinger is in that league of actors so good that they often go unnoticed, a younger Alden Ehrenreich, if you will.
This is a film of two halves, with the initial impetus coming from the strange love story that develops between this cautious but driven young woman and the recently discharged young man. A love story that’s beautifully done, tentative, ethereal, the colour orange prominent – suggesting Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, maybe? – as Aishe and Skinner get to know each other.
It’s a trembling, fragile love, it’ll turn out, choked off to some extent by her job – always working in one kitchen or another – and by his frail grip on the real world. Skinner may have PTSD, or he may just be a lost soul who can’t cope with things without the iron rails of army life. Either way he’s on a rake of pills, and is also self-medicating on booze.
That’s part two – the falling apart bit. Which, it must be said, is an anticlimax after the gorgeousness of the first half. Or maybe that’s the sound of our hopes – especially for Aishe – crashing to the ground, as she tries to get him back on track and we watch to see if she’s going to succeed.
Immigrants “get the job done”, as we learned from Hamilton, and to some extent Preparation for the Next Life isn’t saying much that’s new. Aishe is determined to succeed and it’s the outsider status (outsider outsider, even) that provides at least part of her drive, though in flashback scenes we see that her ex-army dad has drilled hard work into her – and maybe teed her up to be receptive to an army boyfriend. Skinner is the white dude, the normie who has no idea how much he has been held aloft by his peers until the support is withdrawn, and then he’s all at sea.
It’s two films, really. I loved the first one to the extent that I had to remind myself to breathe. The second one, good though it was, couldn’t match it, though both are marked out by a surefootedness from Liu – he never patronises the audience and, with tricks learned from making documentaries, fills in background detail without making a fuss about it.
I looked at Behtiyar’s IMDb entry. Just this film, nothing else. This seems wrong. Once you’ve seen the scene where Aishe and Skinner drink three Corona beers at speed and then dance together you’ll know you’ve seen something special. Hechinger’s career needs no boosting. More Behtiyar!
Preparation for the Next Life – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
