The end of an error
Parting is such sweet sorrow. The After franchise has been in our lives for four years, and while these movies certainly haven’t been the worst thing that has happened to the world in the period between 2019 and 2023, they’re at least in the Bottom 10. But I can’t quite pretend that I’m happy this marvelously miserable journey is over, so let’s take one last victory lap and relive all those beautiful moments before we dive into the “final” After movie, After Everything.
As you may recall, the four-book literary phenomenon After is based on AU (alternate universe) Harry Styles fanfiction that was written by Anna Todd (entirely on her cell phone, thumbs be damned) and posted on WattPad. In said alternate universe, Styles is not a member of the boy band One Direction but rather a sexy damaged college bad boy who falls in angry, passionate love with a new student named Tessa, with whom he has near-constant angry, passionate sex. This story was popular enough to get put out as a proper print novel.
Unfortunately, in our universe, it’s not exactly legal to just go ahead and publish a book about an international superstar fucking a hole through an English major like she’s a sheet of mountain rock and he's a railway engineer whose foreman is on the way to check how the train tunnel is coming along. Thus the character was rechristened Hardin Scott, stripping him of the last vestige of any sort of connection to the One Direction star. In 2019, the powers that be decided that this was great fodder for a movie. Thus Hardin (Hero Beauregard Faulker Fiennes Tiffin, full names only please) and Tessa (Josephine Langford) were brought to the big screen in the titanically boring After, where they made a metric fuckton of money, quadrupling the movie’s $14 million budget.
The love triangle-y sequel, 2020’s After We Collided, was banished from theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic (and not, as should have been the case, due to the fact that After was fucking terrible) and eventually shoved out onto VOD. The following movies, 2021’s After We Fell and 2022’s After Ever Happy, were then shot back-to-back in Bulgaria after all the secondary characters were replaced with different actors due to travel restrictions. Those movies were released in theaters as two-day-only Fathom Events, just like all the best examples of the cinematic craft. I mean, who could forget only being able to see Avatar on either Wednesday or Thursday night at 7PM?
These four movies all follow essentially the same structure. Tessa and Hardin fuck, then fight, then break up, then get back together, not necessarily in that order. The most important tidbit to know from the previous movie is the fact that Hardin wrote a “novel” about their love story titled After (hey, that’s the name of the movie!) and published it without consulting Tessa. She was understandably mad about her private business being broadcast to the world as a (presumably shitty) bestselling book, and broke up with Hardin for what seemed like the last time. If only we were so lucky.
After Everything, which was also released as a Fathom Event despite the fact that everything about this franchise is otherwise unfathomable, picks up more or less at this point. For some reason, it tells an original story that takes place somewhere nebulous between the ending and the epilogue of the book After Ever Happy.
The alcoholic Hardin has fallen right off the wagon again, though for him the wagon has always been more like a rickshaw with one wheel missing anyway. With the deadline for his second novel looming and his grief over losing Tessa too great to allow him to do anything but sulk (not that there’s evidence among these five movies that he’s ever pursued a single activity other than sulking), he decides to move to Lisbon, Portugal because the tax credits for filming there are great.
JK, he’s trying to “work on himself,” which mostly involves binge drinking and lurking over the shoulder of his astonishingly forgiving ex Natalie (Mimi Keene). While he does so, we are treated to a variety of flashbacks to when he and Natalie met as teenagers in England, and the various evil acts he performed upon her before Tessa invoked whatever blood magick it was that transferred the curse of his attention over to herself (it’s unclear if the planned prequel Before has been scrapped and repurposed as these flashbacks, or if the flashback sequences are meant to whet your appetite for said film, which could only ever be a grueling and unpleasant slog the likes of which the world has never known).
And… that’s about it for 70 minutes. After Everything misguidedly insists upon Hardin as a protagonist so hard that Tessa is only shown in hallucinations or interminable flashbacks until mere moments before the credits roll. This is a huge mistake, because as awful as Hardin is with Tessa, he’s infinitely more awful on his own.
So, it turns out the After franchise is like the Star Trek franchise, at least in one very specific way: the even-numbered movies are much better than the odd ones. The franchise only has two modes - “tedious bullshit” and “hilarious bullshit” - and After Everything falls very much in the former, alas. Though I suppose it’s only fitting that the franchise ends with No. 5, so shittiness can outrank quality, however relative those terms may be.
There is just absolutely nothing redeeming about the grotesquely distended Lisbon sequence, with the possible exception of Mimi Keene, who seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that she is playing a character with a past, present, and future who matters in the story. And I guess Mssr. Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin is doing a fine job as well. He has a lighter touch with Hardin than any previous time he’s played the role, which isn’t the same as rendering him a compelling character, but isn’t absolutely tortuous to sit through.
That’s as much good as I can say about any single creative discipline showcased in the movie. These latter-era Afters never rise above “blandly competent” at a filmmaking level, though at least After Everything has fewer lows as low as After Ever Happy, save for a tracking shot where it seems pretty clear that Mimi Keene has forgotten one of her lines and they didn’t bother redoing it. Oh, and of course the moment where the filmmakers can’t resist the chance to stuff Josephine Langford into a wig that makes her look like Ann Veal from Arrested Development. It wouldn’t be an After movie if she didn’t sprout a hideous hairdo in the space of a cut.
The sex scenes in the movie are also handled much better. The fact that I’m saying this about a movie that includes a shot of Tessa navigating Hardin’s penis like it’s one of the wonkier Tetris pieces just goes to show what dark times I’ve had with this franchise. That said, the sex scenes do seem to consistently take place in some kind of nether-space where the setting around the couple fornicating (be it a plane, a wedding venue, or what have you) operates under non-Euclidian architectural geometry and always appears to be completely empty of furnishings or props save for a convenient surface upon which a partner can be placed.
Unfortunately, the fact that there’s for the most part nothing especially egregious going on behind the camera just gives you further opportunity to spend quality time with the plot, which continues to dig through its pockets and turn out absolutely nothing of substance to offer.
For instance, Hardin’s answer to his writer’s block problem is to just write a book about the flashbacks we’ve been seeing throughout the movie, again just writing down things that happened to him and saying it’s “fiction.” I was about to complain that these people clearly don’t know how writing fiction works, but then I realized that there are already five films worth of evidence that they don’t, so the point was moot.
Really, the movie is a much more effective travel commercial than it is a character study. You learn much more about the delicacies of Lisbon than Hardin’s inner life. So at least the Portuguese got their money’s worth.
Hardin’s storyline is so extravagantly boring that I would dearly love to give After Everything the dreaded half-star rating, but it did earn a full star for ramping back into the heterosexual camp nonsense in its final twenty minutes, at which point it careens off a cliff into a stapled-on epilogue that is so unjustified by anything that came before it that several people in my theater (presumably fans, considering they paid $20 to be there) shouted “what the fuck?” as the house lights flickered on.
“What the fuck” territory might be tough for general audiences, but at least it provokes a reaction, unlike the bulk of the movie. The final twenty minutes of After Everything want us to live deliciously, and by George we do. Tessa chastises Hardin for talking about their souls in public. Hardin’s attempt to apologize for manipulating Tessa is to trick her into going onto the dance floor with a cute kid and then looming behind her like Michael Myers. And then - no, I think I’ll keep that part to myself in case any masochists make it this far into the series. But trust me, it’s glorious, glorious heterosexual messery.
Alas, heterosexual messery’s lease hath all too short a date.
The fact that After Everything takes so goddamn long to get anywhere interesting renders it a huge disappointment. It's without a doubt the worst After movie, which should really be a much stiffer competition. Perhaps this was inevitable considering After's track record, but tragically this franchise that was all about banging nevertheless ended with a whimper.
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.
As you may recall, the four-book literary phenomenon After is based on AU (alternate universe) Harry Styles fanfiction that was written by Anna Todd (entirely on her cell phone, thumbs be damned) and posted on WattPad. In said alternate universe, Styles is not a member of the boy band One Direction but rather a sexy damaged college bad boy who falls in angry, passionate love with a new student named Tessa, with whom he has near-constant angry, passionate sex. This story was popular enough to get put out as a proper print novel.
Unfortunately, in our universe, it’s not exactly legal to just go ahead and publish a book about an international superstar fucking a hole through an English major like she’s a sheet of mountain rock and he's a railway engineer whose foreman is on the way to check how the train tunnel is coming along. Thus the character was rechristened Hardin Scott, stripping him of the last vestige of any sort of connection to the One Direction star. In 2019, the powers that be decided that this was great fodder for a movie. Thus Hardin (Hero Beauregard Faulker Fiennes Tiffin, full names only please) and Tessa (Josephine Langford) were brought to the big screen in the titanically boring After, where they made a metric fuckton of money, quadrupling the movie’s $14 million budget.
The love triangle-y sequel, 2020’s After We Collided, was banished from theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic (and not, as should have been the case, due to the fact that After was fucking terrible) and eventually shoved out onto VOD. The following movies, 2021’s After We Fell and 2022’s After Ever Happy, were then shot back-to-back in Bulgaria after all the secondary characters were replaced with different actors due to travel restrictions. Those movies were released in theaters as two-day-only Fathom Events, just like all the best examples of the cinematic craft. I mean, who could forget only being able to see Avatar on either Wednesday or Thursday night at 7PM?
These four movies all follow essentially the same structure. Tessa and Hardin fuck, then fight, then break up, then get back together, not necessarily in that order. The most important tidbit to know from the previous movie is the fact that Hardin wrote a “novel” about their love story titled After (hey, that’s the name of the movie!) and published it without consulting Tessa. She was understandably mad about her private business being broadcast to the world as a (presumably shitty) bestselling book, and broke up with Hardin for what seemed like the last time. If only we were so lucky.
After Everything, which was also released as a Fathom Event despite the fact that everything about this franchise is otherwise unfathomable, picks up more or less at this point. For some reason, it tells an original story that takes place somewhere nebulous between the ending and the epilogue of the book After Ever Happy.
The alcoholic Hardin has fallen right off the wagon again, though for him the wagon has always been more like a rickshaw with one wheel missing anyway. With the deadline for his second novel looming and his grief over losing Tessa too great to allow him to do anything but sulk (not that there’s evidence among these five movies that he’s ever pursued a single activity other than sulking), he decides to move to Lisbon, Portugal because the tax credits for filming there are great.
JK, he’s trying to “work on himself,” which mostly involves binge drinking and lurking over the shoulder of his astonishingly forgiving ex Natalie (Mimi Keene). While he does so, we are treated to a variety of flashbacks to when he and Natalie met as teenagers in England, and the various evil acts he performed upon her before Tessa invoked whatever blood magick it was that transferred the curse of his attention over to herself (it’s unclear if the planned prequel Before has been scrapped and repurposed as these flashbacks, or if the flashback sequences are meant to whet your appetite for said film, which could only ever be a grueling and unpleasant slog the likes of which the world has never known).
And… that’s about it for 70 minutes. After Everything misguidedly insists upon Hardin as a protagonist so hard that Tessa is only shown in hallucinations or interminable flashbacks until mere moments before the credits roll. This is a huge mistake, because as awful as Hardin is with Tessa, he’s infinitely more awful on his own.
So, it turns out the After franchise is like the Star Trek franchise, at least in one very specific way: the even-numbered movies are much better than the odd ones. The franchise only has two modes - “tedious bullshit” and “hilarious bullshit” - and After Everything falls very much in the former, alas. Though I suppose it’s only fitting that the franchise ends with No. 5, so shittiness can outrank quality, however relative those terms may be.
There is just absolutely nothing redeeming about the grotesquely distended Lisbon sequence, with the possible exception of Mimi Keene, who seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that she is playing a character with a past, present, and future who matters in the story. And I guess Mssr. Beauregard Faulkner Fiennes Tiffin is doing a fine job as well. He has a lighter touch with Hardin than any previous time he’s played the role, which isn’t the same as rendering him a compelling character, but isn’t absolutely tortuous to sit through.
That’s as much good as I can say about any single creative discipline showcased in the movie. These latter-era Afters never rise above “blandly competent” at a filmmaking level, though at least After Everything has fewer lows as low as After Ever Happy, save for a tracking shot where it seems pretty clear that Mimi Keene has forgotten one of her lines and they didn’t bother redoing it. Oh, and of course the moment where the filmmakers can’t resist the chance to stuff Josephine Langford into a wig that makes her look like Ann Veal from Arrested Development. It wouldn’t be an After movie if she didn’t sprout a hideous hairdo in the space of a cut.
The sex scenes in the movie are also handled much better. The fact that I’m saying this about a movie that includes a shot of Tessa navigating Hardin’s penis like it’s one of the wonkier Tetris pieces just goes to show what dark times I’ve had with this franchise. That said, the sex scenes do seem to consistently take place in some kind of nether-space where the setting around the couple fornicating (be it a plane, a wedding venue, or what have you) operates under non-Euclidian architectural geometry and always appears to be completely empty of furnishings or props save for a convenient surface upon which a partner can be placed.
Unfortunately, the fact that there’s for the most part nothing especially egregious going on behind the camera just gives you further opportunity to spend quality time with the plot, which continues to dig through its pockets and turn out absolutely nothing of substance to offer.
For instance, Hardin’s answer to his writer’s block problem is to just write a book about the flashbacks we’ve been seeing throughout the movie, again just writing down things that happened to him and saying it’s “fiction.” I was about to complain that these people clearly don’t know how writing fiction works, but then I realized that there are already five films worth of evidence that they don’t, so the point was moot.
Really, the movie is a much more effective travel commercial than it is a character study. You learn much more about the delicacies of Lisbon than Hardin’s inner life. So at least the Portuguese got their money’s worth.
Hardin’s storyline is so extravagantly boring that I would dearly love to give After Everything the dreaded half-star rating, but it did earn a full star for ramping back into the heterosexual camp nonsense in its final twenty minutes, at which point it careens off a cliff into a stapled-on epilogue that is so unjustified by anything that came before it that several people in my theater (presumably fans, considering they paid $20 to be there) shouted “what the fuck?” as the house lights flickered on.
“What the fuck” territory might be tough for general audiences, but at least it provokes a reaction, unlike the bulk of the movie. The final twenty minutes of After Everything want us to live deliciously, and by George we do. Tessa chastises Hardin for talking about their souls in public. Hardin’s attempt to apologize for manipulating Tessa is to trick her into going onto the dance floor with a cute kid and then looming behind her like Michael Myers. And then - no, I think I’ll keep that part to myself in case any masochists make it this far into the series. But trust me, it’s glorious, glorious heterosexual messery.
Alas, heterosexual messery’s lease hath all too short a date.
The fact that After Everything takes so goddamn long to get anywhere interesting renders it a huge disappointment. It's without a doubt the worst After movie, which should really be a much stiffer competition. Perhaps this was inevitable considering After's track record, but tragically this franchise that was all about banging nevertheless ended with a whimper.
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.
