After (2019)

Directed by: Jenny Gage | 105 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Josephine Langford, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Khadijha Red Thunder, Dylan Arnold, Shane Paul McGhie, Samuel Larsen, Inanna Sarkis, Selma Blair, Pia Mia, Swen Temmel, Meadow Williams, Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals, Michael Hull, Sarah Jorge León Chris Kontopidis, Rebecca Lee Robertson

The story behind ‘After’, the book series that gave author Anna Todd her breakthrough, is definitely more interesting than the film itself. Wattpad is a social platform where writers and readers of stories find each other. As a novice writer you can upload stories yourself, but you can also read the imaginations of others. Not only those of your neighbor behind, so to speak, but also the more established names can be found there. Anna Todd has become such an established name, but she started her writing career as a fanfiction writer. Todd is a huge boy band fan and so she wrote a whole romance around Harry Styles from One Direction: After. The stories became so popular that she got an offer from a publisher and not much later the film rights were sold.

‘After’ is about naive freshman college student Tessa Young (Josephine Langford). At the start of the film, her strict mother (Selma Blair) and sweet boyfriend Noah – now in senior year of high school – take her to her dorm room on campus. Her mother is in shock when she sees how her roommate looks and behaves. The weed smell hits them. Mother would prefer to immediately arrange another room for her daughter – of whom she naturally has high expectations – but Tessa puts a stop to that.

Tessa starts her studies in good spirits, but her roommate Steph (nice role of Khadijha Red Thunder) turns out to have quite a few bad friends. One of them, Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), keeps running into the (attractive) body. Tessa can’t stand him right away. The two bicker during literature class about the deeper layer in ‘Pride & Prejudice’. (“Elizabeth Bennet needs to chill,” said Hardin). At a party, Tessa is challenged to a game of Truth or Dare to kiss Hardin. She refuses, runs away, ends up in his room and almost kisses him there again. oh dear. What would Noah say to that?

What follows is a clichéd story of attraction and repulsion, where it must be said that the film is a hundred times more digestible than the book, because Todd makes a mess of it. The chapters are only a few pages, but Todd manages to cover dozens of chapters in a row as Tessa and Hardin get into a fight and make amends. Tired of that relationship. Thank God the film skips a lot of those nonsense fights and hops from climax to climax. However, something of the background – as far as you can speak of that – is lost as a result. Hardin is a little less in the movie moody and a little more readily available to tell something about his past.

The film looks neat and will undoubtedly appeal to fans of the genre. The sex has gone from the 16+ in the book (not for nothing it was labeled by some media as the new “Fifty Shades of Grey”) to a decent 12 years and older. The actors are especially handsome and don’t seem really concerned with showing credible emotions. That is not really handed to them in the scenario. ‘After’ is probably the best that could have been made from Anna Todd’s pulp writings. This is romantic escapism without any depth.