Film review: After is a piece of mushy hogwash, says Rashid Irani
The ploy is hackneyed and goes nowhere; the two leads, while good-looking, share only a tepid chemistry. Give this one a miss.
Close on the heels of Five Feet Apart, here’s an even worse teen romance. After is based on the bestselling young-adult novel by Anna Todd, and is about the rocky relationship between two youngsters who don’t seem right for each other. Yup, that’s it.
She (Josephine Langford) has just enrolled for her first semester in college. An earnest student who wants to major in economics, the virginal protagonist finds herself falling for a classmate (the quirkily named actor Hero Fiennes-Tiffin) who believes that ‘love is just a transaction’.
There are frequent references to the likes of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and F Scott Fitzgerald, which helps little because the students themselves spend most of their time at dorm parties and little of it even in the classroom.
It doesn’t help that the two leads, while good-looking, share only a tepid chemistry. Worse still is the wall-to-wall pop soundtrack that drowns out almost everything else. First-time feature filmmaker Jenny Gage’s direction is hackneyed at best. All in all, After is a thoroughly disposable trifle.
