And lived they all...
For those of you just joining us, the story of the After franchise is a long and winding road, getting longer and windier by the minute. This project started its life as an AU (alternate universe) fan fiction by Anna Todd asking the penetrating question of "What if Harry Styles was a sexy, dangerous college student who loves a bland, bookish girl for Reasons?" This became a Wattpad sensation, which became a legitimately published series of novels about the newly renamed Hardin Scott (at this point any resemblance to the ex-One Directioner, pop superstar, and alleged spitter upon of Chris Pine is moot), which became the 2019 sin-sation After, a film that made $70 million in the box office off its $14 million budget.
That film introduced the world to Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) and Hardin Scott (Hero Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin, full names only please), two young lovers who sometimes find time to be happy in thirty-second snippets between fucking each other and screaming at each other. Considering that there were four books in the series (not counting the prequel, Before), the producers decided to bring back these young scalawags for another adventure.
Enter COVID-19. The planned theatrical release for the 2020 sequel, After We Collided (in which Tessa briefly considers fucking Dylan Sprouse, which makes Hardin very angry) was scrapped in favor of a VOD drop. The 2021 follow-up, After We Fell (in which... well, all I can recall is more fucking and yelling), was shot in Bulgaria in late 2020 with an entirely new supporting cast due to pandemic travel restrictions. To celebrate theaters being open again, this film auspiciously debuted as a two-day-only Fathom Event before shrinking back into the shadows to do God knows what for a month or so and eventually resurfacing on Netflix. Now there is a new film, the title of which I will give you some space to prepare for, lest the non-Euclidean geometry of the grammar send your brain into quivering paroxysms of madness:
After Ever Happy
So After Ever Happy was also released as a two-day theatrical event, because if it ain't broke, why not let Fathom have a whack at it and see what they can do?
After Ever Happy follows essentially the same structure as the other films. Tessa and Hardin are presented with problems, Hardin violently overreacts, and Tessa broods about it, lather, rinse, repeat. We open minutes after the aftermath of the After We Fell finale, in which Hardin learned that his abusive father Ken (Rob Estes) is not his biological dad, because his mother Trish (Louise Lombard) cheated on him with Christian Vance (Stephen Moyer, for some reason uncredited), and Tessa finds him brooding on the street before bringing him back to Christian's wedding to another woman.
Now they're at the wedding and Hardin has another conversation with Vance that sends him immediately out to brood on the street again. Only this time he decides to go to his mother's house and burn it down. Which he does. Tessa is ever so slightly put off by this, but solves it by buying him coffee and fucking him in the front seat of a luxury car. Hardin sends her back to America without him because he's too fucking damaged (frankly, a smart move), where she discovers that her own father Richard (Atanas Srebrev) is dead on the floor of her bathroom. This causes Hardin to realize he loves her, because if he doesn't make a situation about himself, then did it even happen?
Anyway, there are a lot of scenes where they kinda forget they're broken up until Tessa remembers and pushes Hardin away again until eventually she moves to New York City with their mutual friend Landon (Chance Perdomo). At this point, they both attempt to start new lives without each other, as Hardin focuses on fixing his drinking problem and Tessa just tries to live a single day without a brooding, raccoon-eyed Brit threatening to beat up her friends.
I will give After Ever Happy this. It is leagues better than After We Fell, because it makes up for a lack of a plot with a whole heap of telenovela incident, even if that is largely frontloaded. However, this is still only a must-watch if you're a twisted soul like myself who is able to stomach the limited charms of a film series that presents the absolute worst relationship you've ever seen as a sweeping romantic epic. For those keeping score: at this point, the combined run times of the After movies are just about three minutes shy of Titanic and Gone with the Wind put together.
I've been heaping on the film for a long time, so let's take a breather and I'll come up with something nice to say.
Well, there's a scene where Tessa is moving into a new apartment and hangs a framed photo of a cat wearing a birthday hat. That was pretty neat.
OK, in all seriousness, there are a couple good things about the movie. There is a scene where Tessa is seeing memories of her and Hardin all around an empty apartment before they crumble into dust like the end of Infinity War, which was appropriately melodramatic given the source material, and the only visual moment of note in the entire film. Also, Mira Sorvino is occasionally in this movie, playing Tessa's mom, and she is excellent every time we see her. Josephine Langford isn't half bad herself, though all her best moments come when she is being playful and happy with anybody who isn't Hardin, which happens in a cumulative 25 seconds or so of the film.
The same cannot be said for Hero Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin, who is given an inscrutable, one-dimensional character and plays him like one. Oh whoops, guess we're back to trashing the movie. Obviously the script is a problem, but that's because it's adapted from a problem, mishandling everything from infertility to alcoholism to arson to human behavior (at one point Vance thanks his wife for bringing him coffee by grabbing her wrist).
The filmmaking is hardly up to snuff either, unfortunately. For the most part, it's presented with the same bland, digital sheen one might expect from a VOD-forward movie, but any time there is a stylistic choice made, it is the wrong one. For instance, the soundtrack, on which each song somehow threads the needle of featuring on-the-nose lyrics but with a completely misguided genre and tone. Everyone seems to have either given up on the movie or at least not risen above the limitations of shooting a film in Bulgaria that is set in three different cities in two different countries, neither of which is Bulgaria. This extends from the hair and makeup person who allows Tessa to sprout a truly heinous set of bangs between cuts to the camera person whose relationship with the 180-degree line is more troubling than Tessa and Hardin's.
Also, I'm sorry, but the primary drive for anyone to make or watch this movie is to watch the pretty people have sex, and every single one of the film's sex scenes are completely bungled. Pick your poison: the aggressive close-up of faces bobbing up and down that hardly seem attached to bodies, or the sequence shot with so much lens flare that it looks like they're fucking in the Focus Features logo.
All this to say, I had a blast watching After Ever Happy. I can never quite get myself to recommend these films to people who love bad movies because they're impossibly bland. But they're at least a flavor of bland that I find absolutely intoxicating. Although the story may be over, I for one am glad I've had the privilege of following along.
Wait, what was that whisper on the wind? Could there possibly be... a fifth movie titled After Everything that is telling a whole new continued story that isn't in the books? And a prequel film called Before, which is presumably about two boring teenagers playing tiddlywinks, not meeting each other, and one of them occasionally punches a puppy in the face? You bet your ass both of these films are in production, motherfuckers! I hope they make a new After movie every year until the heat death of the universe. I'll be there opening night every time.
Auf wiedersehen, After. Until we meet again...
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
That film introduced the world to Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) and Hardin Scott (Hero Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin, full names only please), two young lovers who sometimes find time to be happy in thirty-second snippets between fucking each other and screaming at each other. Considering that there were four books in the series (not counting the prequel, Before), the producers decided to bring back these young scalawags for another adventure.
Enter COVID-19. The planned theatrical release for the 2020 sequel, After We Collided (in which Tessa briefly considers fucking Dylan Sprouse, which makes Hardin very angry) was scrapped in favor of a VOD drop. The 2021 follow-up, After We Fell (in which... well, all I can recall is more fucking and yelling), was shot in Bulgaria in late 2020 with an entirely new supporting cast due to pandemic travel restrictions. To celebrate theaters being open again, this film auspiciously debuted as a two-day-only Fathom Event before shrinking back into the shadows to do God knows what for a month or so and eventually resurfacing on Netflix. Now there is a new film, the title of which I will give you some space to prepare for, lest the non-Euclidean geometry of the grammar send your brain into quivering paroxysms of madness:
After Ever Happy
So After Ever Happy was also released as a two-day theatrical event, because if it ain't broke, why not let Fathom have a whack at it and see what they can do?
After Ever Happy follows essentially the same structure as the other films. Tessa and Hardin are presented with problems, Hardin violently overreacts, and Tessa broods about it, lather, rinse, repeat. We open minutes after the aftermath of the After We Fell finale, in which Hardin learned that his abusive father Ken (Rob Estes) is not his biological dad, because his mother Trish (Louise Lombard) cheated on him with Christian Vance (Stephen Moyer, for some reason uncredited), and Tessa finds him brooding on the street before bringing him back to Christian's wedding to another woman.
Now they're at the wedding and Hardin has another conversation with Vance that sends him immediately out to brood on the street again. Only this time he decides to go to his mother's house and burn it down. Which he does. Tessa is ever so slightly put off by this, but solves it by buying him coffee and fucking him in the front seat of a luxury car. Hardin sends her back to America without him because he's too fucking damaged (frankly, a smart move), where she discovers that her own father Richard (Atanas Srebrev) is dead on the floor of her bathroom. This causes Hardin to realize he loves her, because if he doesn't make a situation about himself, then did it even happen?
Anyway, there are a lot of scenes where they kinda forget they're broken up until Tessa remembers and pushes Hardin away again until eventually she moves to New York City with their mutual friend Landon (Chance Perdomo). At this point, they both attempt to start new lives without each other, as Hardin focuses on fixing his drinking problem and Tessa just tries to live a single day without a brooding, raccoon-eyed Brit threatening to beat up her friends.
I will give After Ever Happy this. It is leagues better than After We Fell, because it makes up for a lack of a plot with a whole heap of telenovela incident, even if that is largely frontloaded. However, this is still only a must-watch if you're a twisted soul like myself who is able to stomach the limited charms of a film series that presents the absolute worst relationship you've ever seen as a sweeping romantic epic. For those keeping score: at this point, the combined run times of the After movies are just about three minutes shy of Titanic and Gone with the Wind put together.
I've been heaping on the film for a long time, so let's take a breather and I'll come up with something nice to say.
Well, there's a scene where Tessa is moving into a new apartment and hangs a framed photo of a cat wearing a birthday hat. That was pretty neat.
OK, in all seriousness, there are a couple good things about the movie. There is a scene where Tessa is seeing memories of her and Hardin all around an empty apartment before they crumble into dust like the end of Infinity War, which was appropriately melodramatic given the source material, and the only visual moment of note in the entire film. Also, Mira Sorvino is occasionally in this movie, playing Tessa's mom, and she is excellent every time we see her. Josephine Langford isn't half bad herself, though all her best moments come when she is being playful and happy with anybody who isn't Hardin, which happens in a cumulative 25 seconds or so of the film.
The same cannot be said for Hero Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin, who is given an inscrutable, one-dimensional character and plays him like one. Oh whoops, guess we're back to trashing the movie. Obviously the script is a problem, but that's because it's adapted from a problem, mishandling everything from infertility to alcoholism to arson to human behavior (at one point Vance thanks his wife for bringing him coffee by grabbing her wrist).
The filmmaking is hardly up to snuff either, unfortunately. For the most part, it's presented with the same bland, digital sheen one might expect from a VOD-forward movie, but any time there is a stylistic choice made, it is the wrong one. For instance, the soundtrack, on which each song somehow threads the needle of featuring on-the-nose lyrics but with a completely misguided genre and tone. Everyone seems to have either given up on the movie or at least not risen above the limitations of shooting a film in Bulgaria that is set in three different cities in two different countries, neither of which is Bulgaria. This extends from the hair and makeup person who allows Tessa to sprout a truly heinous set of bangs between cuts to the camera person whose relationship with the 180-degree line is more troubling than Tessa and Hardin's.
Also, I'm sorry, but the primary drive for anyone to make or watch this movie is to watch the pretty people have sex, and every single one of the film's sex scenes are completely bungled. Pick your poison: the aggressive close-up of faces bobbing up and down that hardly seem attached to bodies, or the sequence shot with so much lens flare that it looks like they're fucking in the Focus Features logo.
All this to say, I had a blast watching After Ever Happy. I can never quite get myself to recommend these films to people who love bad movies because they're impossibly bland. But they're at least a flavor of bland that I find absolutely intoxicating. Although the story may be over, I for one am glad I've had the privilege of following along.
Wait, what was that whisper on the wind? Could there possibly be... a fifth movie titled After Everything that is telling a whole new continued story that isn't in the books? And a prequel film called Before, which is presumably about two boring teenagers playing tiddlywinks, not meeting each other, and one of them occasionally punches a puppy in the face? You bet your ass both of these films are in production, motherfuckers! I hope they make a new After movie every year until the heat death of the universe. I'll be there opening night every time.
Auf wiedersehen, After. Until we meet again...
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
