Somewhere in the back alleys of New York, one floor below street level, in a kitchen that never stops humming… Amid steam, grease, and untimely exhaustion, Aişe’s face appears. A few subway stops away, Skinner—still carrying the sound of war inside him—moves through crowds without ever truly touching anyone. Bing Liu’s debut narrative feature, Preparation for the Next Life, follows the moment these two strangers’ paths cross and unflinchingly reveals the cracks beneath the American Dream.
Adapted from Atticus Lish’s widely acclaimed novel, the film is less interested in a classic “impossible love” than in the fleeting possibility that two wounded bodies, two traumas, might become a temporary shelter for each other. One is an American ex-soldier wandering his own country as if he never came home; the other is a Uyghur immigrant who has learned invisibility as a survival skill. In the middle of the concrete jungle, they reach out to touch each other’s ghosts.
Aişe and Skinner: Outside the Law, on the Edge of Time
The film centres on Aişe, a character whose very existence is as contested as her citizenship. Raised under a soldier father’s discipline and carrying the weight of a past shattered by displacement, she works off-the-books in Chinatown’s underground kitchens. Survival, for her, is a reflex that comes before emotion. Her physical strength, agility, and cool-headedness simultaneously enable both abuse and invisibility.
Skinner is an American soldier back from three tours. His PTSD manifests less in explosive outbursts than in sudden silences and stares that drift into emptiness. He tries to hold down jobs while the war inside him refuses to end. He belongs neither to the army, nor to “normal life,” nor even fully to himself.
Their meeting is quick; their transformation is slow. The more they lean on each other, the more visible the weight of their pasts becomes. The film refuses to polish the “romantic” side of their relationship; instead, it asks whether two broken people have the strength to save each other at all.
The Unseen Geography of New York
This is not the postcard New York. Liu turns the camera away from skyscrapers toward narrow corridors one floor underground, rooms that never see neon light, temporary beds, and back doors. Chinatown basements, cheap flophouses, highway shoulders, bridge pilings—the city is never mere backdrop; it is an active player that shapes the characters’ fates.
This choice reflects Liu’s documentary roots. Known for Minding the Gap, the director carries that same patient, observational gaze into fiction. Dialogue leans on small everyday fractures rather than grand statements. Characters don’t explain themselves; their traumas seep through zigzags in behaviour and long silences.
Looking at the New American Identity from the Outside
The film slots perfectly into what critics call the “New American Identity Drama.” Through immigrants, war veterans, and precarious workers, it offers an internal critique of contemporary America—without slogans or manifestos, simply through the story of two lonely people.
Aişe’s Uyghur identity is not background detail; it embodies the bodily and mental toll of displacement. Skinner’s PTSD represents a reality lived by countless returning soldiers yet often buried in statistics. By bringing these two conflict zones—Middle Eastern wars and the oppression faced by Uyghurs—together in New York, the film reminds us that war is a burden carried across geographies.
Love or Shelter?
The emotional spine is the on-and-off relationship between Aişe and Skinner. The prospect of living together or marriage is, for Aişe, also a door to legal status; for Skinner, a threshold that terrifies him with responsibility. Liu draws this dynamic with transparent realism: there is love in this relationship, but also dependency; hope, but also the risk of abuse.
The story is framed by Aişe’s letter/diary entries addressed to a family member, confining the timeline to a narrow, almost elegiac span. This choice lends the film a lightly mournful tone, making the viewer feel both immersed in the events and watching them through the filter of recollection.
Bing Liu’s Gaze: From Documentary to Fiction
Liu’s documentary background is one of the film’s greatest strengths. The camera never judges; it opens a space of empathy that sidesteps good–bad, right–wrong dialectics. The locations are dirty, cramped, harsh—yet never exoticised. Aişe and Skinner’s fragile relationship with the world is built from small gestures rather than grand dramatic explosions.
Sebiye Behtiyar (Aişe) and Fred Hechinger (Skinner) deliver performances that carry this approach. Their chemistry doesn’t “sparkle” in the classic cinematic sense; it is exactly this cracked, unsteady quality that defines the film’s emotion. Critics have praised it; some viewers find it “challenging.”
Awards, Reviews, and Audience Distance
Preparation for the Next Life has already earned strong critical approval.
- Metacritic: 83 Metascore—an impressive level for an independent drama.
- Two major nominations (including the Gotham Awards) signal its presence in this awards season.
Audience reception is more divided: an IMDb user score of 6.6/10 confirms the film isn’t for everyone. Some find the relationship chemistry weak and the narrative “meandering and repetitive.” Yet that very split clarifies the film’s tone: this is not a comfortable love story; it demands emotional risk from the viewer as well.
Apartment No:26 Note
A Story Built on the Edge of a Wound
Preparation for the Next Life spreads heavy themes—post-war trauma, migration, invisible labour, modern urban loneliness—across two people’s small movements, hesitations, and mistakes instead of cramming them into one big statement. Aişe never fully escapes; Skinner never fully heals. Yet from that very incompleteness, the film extracts a fragile kind of hope.
In his fiction debut, Bing Liu is less interested in crafting a “perfect narrative” than in leaving the feeling of a genuine encounter. The result: exhausting, heavy, at times unsettling—but a film that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.
For anyone wanting to think about migration, post-war life, invisible work, and under what conditions love is possible, Preparation for the Next Life establishes itself as one of 2025’s unmissable independent films.
