While TV shows like Lost and The Good Place turned heads with their approach to conveying the great beyond, films have had a long track record of doing just the same.
The following are examples in cinema - dating as far back as over 70 years ago - of characters thrust into many different afterlife scenarios. Each is unique in their own way, effectively inspiring their respective audiences to dig deep down and acknowledge what could potentially await them in the next realm. Omitted, but worth an honorable mention: Field of Dreams - because it's not Heaven - it's Iowa.
Enter The Void (2009)
Gaspar Noé's experimental art film follows the journey of an American drug dealer shot down in Tokyo who is subsequently condemned to a purgatorial, out-of-body experience told predominantly from the first-person perspective.
Its psychedelia-laced cinematography of neon-lit club scenes and the deceased on Earth floating with ease helped Enter the Void divide audiences at Cannes and at the box-office alike. Yet there is no disputing its crane shot-heavy narrative put viewers hauntingly in the mind's eye of he who has passed over to the next plane of existence.
What Dreams May Come (1998)
In the visual effects Oscar-winning 1998 film, the late Robin Williams - fresh off winning an Oscar of his own for Good Will Hunting, deemed his best film here - starred as a fatal car crash victim seeking to reunite with his family in the afterlife.
Upon taking the advice that lingering on Earth would only cause more harm, Williams' Dr. Chris Nielsen moves on by conjuring up an idyllic landscape brushed with the same strokes his artist wife Annie's (Annabella Sciorra) paintings featured. However, Nielsen can only stay for so long, vowing to rescue Annie from a self-imposed Hell after learning of her suicide.
Beetlejuice (1988)
Tim Burton's twisted creative drive resulted in the dead come alive with his 1988 film that stars Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as a deceased couple who struggle to haunt the snobs who have moved into their home.
They befriend the new residents' teenage daughter - the Gothic-dressed, underworld-informed Lydia (Ryder) - while stalling until they inevitability must summon the titular character himself (Keaton) to do the dirty work. Colorful hallucination-adjacent visuals accompany the film that is a title should dare not speak three consecutive times if they want to hold on to their sanity hats.
A Ghost Story (2017)
Starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the majority of this light-on-dialogue film features the latter in basic, white-sheet ghost garb as he watches his wife (Mara) slowly begin to move on without him.
Despite the punchline such a set-up could provide in a more comedy-focused film, David Lowery's A Ghost Story remains as serious in its convictions as it does in executing its tear-producing payoff.
The Lovely Bones (2009)
Prior to plunging back into the Middle Earth terrain he built a major portion of his legacy on, Peter Jackson tackled another pre-existing intellectual property, but in an isolated capacity (in addition to 2005's King Kong).
The Lovely Bones starred Saoirse Ronan as a murder victim whose soul remains on Earth to help guide her grief-stricken loved ones in their simultaneous quest to find sense in her death, and the man (Stanley Tucci, in an Oscar-nominated supporting turn) responsible.
After Life
After Life tells of a post-reality where a waystation processes the recently deceased, whose heavenly assignments are based on the one happy memory of their choosing. Each new arrival is given a week to select their eternal rest.
Surprisingly, this 1998 Japanese film has not been remade for American audiences yet. However, this could prove to be a silver lining - as the risk of shattering a singular work is outweighed by the experience of viewing it in its current iteration.
Heaven Can Wait
Quadruple threat actor/director/producer/writer Warren Beatty may have out-kicked his coverage with this fantasy comedy about an NFL quarterback taken far before his time.
Eventually remade as Down to Earth (2001) by Chris Rock - who insists his Saw reboot will not be a comedy - those familiar with both can attest to the story's merits. In it, angels anxiously struggle to save their own behinds by finding a new host for a soul who has been wrongfully commuted from earth to the Pearly Gates. Beatty's Joe Pendleton may have thrown touchdown passes prior, but in Heaven Can Wait, he is dealt nothing but curveballs.
Defending Your Life (1992)
Albert Brooks' film lessened the blow of mortality with its comedic overtones. His overly neurotic former car salesman character stresses the verdict of his looming appeal to move on from Judgement City to the Promised Land.
Those seeking to sample similar material following the aftermath of NBC's The Good Place will find what they are searching for in Defending Your Life, a film that walked so The Good Place and other vehicles of similar, fate-involved ambition could run on cloud divine.
Vanilla Sky (2001)
David Aames' (Tom Cruise) commitment to overcome his dual fear of heights and loss-of-handsomeness serves as the energizer bunny that never stops drumming this Jerry Maguire/Twilight Zone mix into viewer's personal playlist.
Though left up to many interpretations, Cruise and Cameron Crowe's American pop culture-packed remake of the 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes does provide a major reveal in the end - that Aames' recovery from his vanity-shattering facial disfiguration and subsequent descent into homicidal madness were a result of a lucid dream gone haywire. This was an excursion offered to him by a cryogenic corporation called "Life Extension" in lieu of a conventional death and indeterminate afterlife experience.
A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
As World II winds down, a Royal Air Force pilot (David Niven) is forced to abandon his badly damaged craft without a parachute - a fall that should have killed him, if not for Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) - an afterlife escort - dropping the ball.
This British fantasy romance - originally released in the US as Stairway to Heaven - then deploys world-connecting special effects and unprecedented technicolor photography to follow the improbable survivor as he battles for his right to remain alive before a celestial court.