After

The Illusion of Danger in Soft Focus

I've always been interested in what happens when the internet's unruly id gets cleaned up for studio release. *After* started as One Direction fanfiction on Wattpad, full of chaotic, supposedly R-rated fantasy about a sweet girl and a tattooed, emotionally volatile stand-in for Harry Styles. You'd think a movie adaptation might keep some of that messy adolescent voltage. Jenny Gage's 2019 version mostly doesn't. Watching it is like drinking flat diet soda: the branding promises a jolt, but the fizz is long gone.



Gage came in with solid credentials. Her documentary *All This Panic* had real feeling to it, and she talked openly about wanting to tell this story through a female gaze, turning the source's lurid energy into something like an honest account of a young woman's sexual awakening. That's a worthwhile idea. The problem is the material the script leaves her with. Tessa (Josephine Langford) barely registers as a person so much as a bundle of wholesome tropes—studious, cardiganed, tethered to an overbearing mother. Then Hardin Scott arrives, played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin as a British mood board of brooding poses, vintage band t-shirts, and aggressively deployed classic literature.



Visually, the movie wants to live inside a permanently filtered Instagram post. Everything is warm light, fingertips brushing, lingering stares across dorm rooms. But the whole thing feels scrubbed down. Even Tessa's allegedly dangerous new crowd mostly looks like it spends evenings vaping on couches and talking softly. The lake scene, where she and Hardin swim alone and the movie wants us to read freedom and awakening, is a perfect example. It isn't sensual so much as carefully arranged. RogerEbert.com got there first and more bluntly: "the performances are consistently monotone, and the dialogue is alternately treacly... and on-the-nose." Hard to argue. The actors seem trapped in a sealed environment where nobody is allowed to sound like a person.



Even so, I ended up with some sympathy for both leads. Langford does what she can to find a pulse in Tessa. There are small moments—like the nervous way she resets her posture when Hardin walks in—where you glimpse an actual teenager realizing the life she mapped out suddenly feels too small. Fiennes Tiffin has the rougher assignment. He has to sell a supposedly dangerous intellectual whose big seduction move is quoting *Wuthering Heights* without irony. Mostly he leans on the pout and the slouch. Maybe that's a limitation in the performance. Maybe it's the only possible response to this dialogue. Either way, *After* desperately wants to be a new generational landmark, something like a slicker *Cruel Intentions* for the Wattpad era. What it lands on is much tamer: a polite, oddly chaste warning label about boys who wear leather jackets indoors.