Movie Substrate · Film
Collateral Beauty (2016)
★ 7.2 · 5,543 ratings on TMDB
We are all connected
Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.
DirectorDavid Frankel
The emergence reading
In Collateral Beauty, consciousness is carried by abstract concepts — a plane of “personified abstractions”. The story fights on E8/E10 of the E0–E14 reality ladder, compressing love, time, death, grief, corporate.
↷ abstract conceptsUSlovetimedeathgriefcorporate
Same rung, same subject
Films fighting at the same level of reality, about the same things.
Also hides consciousness here
Other films that move a human interior onto the same kind of thing.
Meet Joe Black (1998)consciousness in abstractions · personified death
Orpheus (1950)consciousness in abstractions · poetic underworld
Slumberland (2022)consciousness in abstractions · dreamscape
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)consciousness in abstractions · golf mythic journey
The Seventh Seal (1957)consciousness in abstractions · medieval mortality stage
The Shack (2017)consciousness in abstractions · spiritual retreatSame subject, different mask
The same preoccupations carried by a different kind of thing — grief told through the dead, an animal, a machine.
Just Like Heaven (2005)consciousness in the dead · death, grief
Charlie St. Cloud (2010)consciousness in the dead · death, grief
The Flash (2023)consciousness in aliens · grief, time
The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019)consciousness in animals · grief, love
Replicas (2018)consciousness in machines · corporate, grief
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)consciousness carried elsewhere · death, love
