After
Director: Jenny Gage
Runtime: 145mins
After is a teen romance drama and chances are you’ll already know if you’ll like it. It indulges in all the clichés, from the soft guitar music and the obligatory pop songs that swell up to make sure you know what’s going to happen, to the forced conflict to inject narrative tension into the third act. But, often clichés are clichés for a reason, director Jenny Gage knows what notes they need to hit and when a bit of cheese is called for.
We open with our protagonist Tessa Young (Josephine Langford), a young woman who is literally described as bookish later in the film, preparing with her boyfriend, Noah (Dylan Arnold), and mother, Carol (Selma Blair), to move an unspecified distance for college. Upon arrival, there is immediate tension as Carol does not approve of her indie-scene roommate Tristan (Pia Mia), mentally categorising her in the ‘bad influence’ basket. Now, this is a teen movie in every sense of the word, and I do not mean that as an insult. It attempts to capture a very adolescent feeling and it’s trying to appeal to the teen experience of the world. So yes, we’re dealing with broad archetypes.
Our characters are exactly what they look like, the dark, brooding, bad boy (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin as Hardin Scott) is exactly that and of course has a romantic soul deep-down that leads them to fall for the wide-eyed, small-town newbie. The fun-loving friends are clear from their tattoos and piercings, while the more academically minded have the usual more conservative wardrobe. It’s also a teenage idea of what university is like. The occasional shot of reading in the library or sitting through a lecture, add some in-lecture debates with the ‘cool teacher’ and intersperse with party and diner scenes. Leaning on archetypes flattens the characters and plot, really no one but our leads get given much to do throughout the entire runtime and there’s a severe shortage of chemistry between the rest of the cast, but again, part of being a teenager is being so caught up in your emotions that it seems to fill your entire life, or indeed screentime.
Romance is an interesting genre. In many ways it’s the last refuge of B-movie or pulp charm, be it Mills and Boon or the bizarre, thriving online publishing boom. It’s also a magnet for a lot of hate. There was a collective orgy of vitriol thrown at Twilight and similar work, despite having more artistic value than any number of Adam Sandler’s 2-hour advertisements. And lest we forget that it is a genre more than capable of redefining the form, Romeo and Juliet is literally a teen romance after all.
After doesn’t rise so high, it’s no Princess Bride but it all works as a decent, pulpy experience. At its best, it manages a decent impression of 10 Things I Hate About You, with the homage to the Taming of the Shrew swapped out for Pride and Prejudice and borrowing a couple of plot points whole cloth. If this is your thing, and you’ve seen 10 Things to many times, you do a lot worse.
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