Matt Damon stars in Clint Eastwood's new film, Hereafter. (Warner Bros.)

Clint Eastwood starts his latest directorial effort, Hereafter, with a dizzying, gutsy sequence I didn’t think he had in him. Gentle guitar strumming can be heard on the soundtrack, seeming to promise vintage Eastwood: something old fashioned, elegant, tasteful, maybe even a little dull. But no sooner has the camera surveyed the grounds of an idyllic Indonesian beach resort than a tsunami hits, giving way to some truly visceral filmmaking. As the wave crashes through the city streets, it uproots palm trees, cars and people, carrying the camera (and us) right along with it.

For a movie that purports to be a serious inquiry into spirituality, grief and death, Hereafter is downright skittish.

These terrifying moments end almost as quickly as they begin, leaving casualties and piles of rubble in their wake. How, the movie asks, can one go on after an incident like this? A good question, since Hereafter never quite recovers post-tsunami. After treating the audience to an opening that approximates the horror of staring death in the face, Eastwood backs down, settling for a trio of interwoven storylines that never reach the heights achieved in that first set piece.

The story proper begins with Marie Lelay (Cécile de France), a French TV journalist who was vacationing when the tsunami first hit. Pulled under the waves and knocked unconscious, she glimpsed something that looked like the afterlife – rendered here as throngs of black, smudgy people bathed in garish white light. Now attempting to return to normal life, she’s haunted by what she saw underwater and plagued by questions about what lies beyond.

Taking its cue from Babel, Peter Morgan’s screenplay stretches out across the globe to introduce two more wounded, death-obsessed characters. In London, a troubled young boy, Marcus (played by twin brothers George and Frankie McLaren), is struggling to deal with being placed in foster care, as well as the tragic death of his twin brother, Jason. In keeping with the overall clunkiness of the script, he seeks answers about Jason’s demise by Googling the phrase, “What happens when you die?”

Across the pond in San Francisco, George Lonegan (Matt Damon) is trying to lead a life of quiet anonymity, slumming in a factory job after a former career as a medium. George sees dead people – by touching a bereaved person’s hands, he can interact with those lumpen black blobs Marie witnessed in her near-death vision. But as the movie repeatedly reminds us, this is not a gift but a curse and, by his own admission, George’s psychic abilities give him migraines and make him feel like an isolated freak.

The George plotline is by far the most interesting of the three, in part because Damon is well suited to the role. The character is so haunted, he just wants to disappear, and that allows Damon to do the mole-like burrowing he does best – hiding under some extra weight and a fuddy-duddy sweater, the actor has no vanity. George’s ability to see the other side all but prohibits him from having normal relationships with others – a fact Damon registers clearly in some poignant scenes when the psychic is shown eating alone, or falling asleep with nothing but his Charles Dickens books on tape to keep him company.

Damon is also smart enough to spike his lines with hints of dry humour, notably in the moments where he flirts with a fellow student (Bryce Dallas Howard, who seems to have wandered in from another movie entirely) at a night-school Italian cooking class. These scenes don’t really fit with the rest of Hereafter, but you’ll be thankful all the same: finally, some signs of life!

Without George, Hereafter would be an utter disaster – the Marie subplot is clichéd and merely dull, while the Marcus story is clichéd and manipulative. Following her white-light hunches all the way to a hospice in Switzerland, Marie is saddled with some truly bad dialogue. Meanwhile, Marcus delivers maudlin speeches to his dead sibling’s baseball cap.

There’s a lot of implausible stuff to wade through before Hereafter wends its way to its ill-conceived conclusion. You know from the start that the three characters are fated to intersect, but when they do, it’s shockingly anti-climactic. These final scenes encapsulate all that’s wrong with Hereafter. On a number of occasions, Eastwood and Morgan show their hand too early, and the result is a movie where the dramatic stakes are never very high.

Hereafter is still a visually polished piece of work, and the movie’s fitfully engaging script would probably be forgivable were it not for the fact Eastwood cops out on his initial setup. For a movie that purports to be a serious inquiry into spirituality, grief and death, Hereafter is downright skittish. After Marie’s initial brush with death and a brief sequence in which Marcus seeks guidance from YouTube clips and some money-grubbing psychics, both filmmaker and screenwriter back away from the discussion, opting for laughable developments that defy Hereafter’s own logic.

While watching this movie, my mind kept returning to Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, another recent film by an aging director grappling with the subject of mortality. Allen once joked, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” For all its serious speeches about our inability to confront death, Hereafter suggests Eastwood doesn’t want to be there when it happens, either. After viewing this dreary glimpse of what’s in store, I can’t say that I blame him.

Hereafter opens in Toronto on Oct. 15 and the rest of the country on Oct. 22.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.