[5] In August 2021,[6] The Criterion Collection announced a re-release of the film, in a 2K remaster together with interviews, deleted scenes, audio commentary and an essay by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Every Monday, a group of recently deceased people check-in: the social workers in the lodge ask them to go back over their life and choose one single memory to take into the afterlife.

Told that she's the thirtieth to choose Disneyland rides (most of the others were also teenage girls), she is gently coaxed into coming up with something more original from her childhood (the scent of fresh laundry and the feeling of her mother, whom she was cuddling against).

An older man incessantly talks about sex and prostitutes, but ultimately chooses the memory of his daughter handing him the bouquet at her wedding.

Takashi has been assigned to help Ichiro Watanabe, a 70-year-old man who glumly remembers his dull, conventional life in an arranged marriage as unfulfilling.

To jog his memory, Takashi plays back excerpts from a file of year-by-year videotapes recording Watanabe's life.

Takashi asks him not to apologize and reveals to Watanabe that all the counsellors staying in the lodge are souls who refused or were unable to choose a memory.

On Saturday, all the hosted souls except the wild-haired young man watch the films of their recreated memories in a screening room, and as soon as each person sees their own, they vanish.

[8] In the development phase of the script, the director interviewed more than five hundred people from disparate social backgrounds, asking them to tell him about their memories and choose the single one they would keep.

[10][11] About this ambiguous, fleeting nature of memory, Kore-eda reflects: I saw that human emotions are the sparks that fly when "truth" and "fiction" collide.

Although the memories in After Life are presented as real experiences that are later reconstructed as film, you can't really distinguish the stories characters tell as "truth" and the recreations as "fiction".

[14] On AllMovie, Keith Phipps talks about the film as "a peculiar and uniquely moving examination of life after death", observing how "almost incidentally [it] serves as a meditation on filmmaking".

[15] "Its unhurried pace and lack of melodrama, like its subject, may linger in the memory long afterwards", adds Jonathan Crow in the same review.