Movie Review: Painfully Earnest 'After' Is Hard to Watch

After is a painfully earnest romantic teen drama starring a pair of starry eyed millennials, one a naive bumpkin at a big city college for the first time and the other a mopey, emo bad boy. If you’re wondering if this story has been recycled from a piece of fan fiction you’re really on to something. After is actually based on a recycled bit of One Direction fan fiction that was picked up and turned into a novel.

The story goes that in 2014, writer Anna Todd posted the original story for After on a website called Wattpad. The story was very loosely based on the boy band One Direction, in that the characters carried the names of the band members. The character names were the only tie to the One Directioners and yet the story was a huge hit. Frank was invited to adapt After into a novel, even as the story remained for free on Wattpad.

The wild popularity of this story aside, After was captured by Hollywood not long after the novel debuted and the film struggled to get developed. Enter first time feature director Jenny Gage. Not only did Gage get the film into full development, she worked out a screenplay that omitted the One Direction connection and made the story more cinematic. That’s not to say that the film is very good, but the story is, at least, built like a movie and not a piece of undercooked fan service.

After stars Josephine Langford as Tessa. Tessa is leaving home for the first time to attend college. In leaving the nest she is leaving behind her long term high school boyfriend, Noah (Dylan Arnold) and her controlling mother Carol (Selma Blair) for the first time. We know college is going to be a very different experience for Tessa because we meet her new roommate, Molly (Inanna Sarkis) and find out that she’s gay. I know, stop the presses.

The plot kicks in when Tessa returns from taking a shower to find a boy sitting on her bed. The boy is Hardin (Hero Fiennes, of the famous Fiennes’s) and he’s immediately a jerk to her, unwilling to leave the room and give her privacy to dress. Fiennes plays this moment so charmlessly that I wondered if he was really going to end up being the romantic protagonist. The scene completely fails in its attempt to make Hardin anything other than a petulant weenie.

Cut to a party scene, Molly has finally convinced Tessa to do something other than study. At the party, Tessa runs out on a game of truth or dare after being dared to kiss Hardin. However, in her running off she finds herself hiding in Hardin’s bedroom, unaware that the party was in his dorm. Via the forced exposition of his book shelf we are told to believe that the emo-party boy is secretly a genius who has a deeply annotated copy of Wuthering Heights to stand in for actual intelligence. The two share a moment of connection over a love of books and the scene sputters to a close.

The following day, the two are together in a literature class and enter into an argument over Jane Austen that, like The Wuthering Heights thing, is yet another opportunity to convince us Hardin has depth beyond his Robert Smith from The Cure turned member of One Direction aesthetic. Hardin’s hot take on Jane Austin and claim that love is nothing more than a transaction is supposed to make him appear sad, arrogant and brooding, a man perfectly positioned to be won over by true love. Instead, it furthers our perception of him as a collection of dim cliches.

Here is where the plot proper kicks off with Tessa doing her pixie-ish best to turn Hardin’s bad boy frown upside down. She succeeds, for the most part but After is an idiot plot, don’t forget that, and when she says, “There is nothing you could do to change how I feel about you,” even an untrained moviegoer can feel the slash cut to the thing he could do to change how she feels about him coming. I was honestly embarrassed for everyone involved in After after watching this series of scenes, a major movie studio released After and should have stepped in to prevent such an embarrassment from seeing the light of day.

First time filmmaker Jenny Gage can’t be blamed for this, there needed to be more experienced hands to step in and keep mistakes like this from being made. Gage does not do a poor job with After, but her inexperience combined with this painfully earnest, rudimentary teen romance story make for a very bad combination. A major studio making a silly bit of fan-fiction into a major motion picture should have taken the reigns and did more to keep everyone from embarrassing themselves.

The studio clearly did not care about the fate of After. They likely felt that the built in fan base would swallow a mere translation of this painfully amateur text to the big screen and putting any more effort into it wasn’t necessary. From a business perspective, they probably aren’t wrong. Millions of teens read After in its One Direction fan-fic form, all the studio needs is a few hundred thousand of those same fans to plunk down $10.00 at the theater to come away with a win. Who cares about the quality, let a first time director and unknown cast knock themselves out.

Yes, that sulphuric, smoky odor you’re picking up is high level cynicism. It’s a non-caring film studio tossing product out the door with the only goal being a modest profit and zero care for whether what is created has any merit. I’m not naive enough for this to be a genuine lament, I am old enough and experienced enough to know that this is how Hollywood studios work, they are businesses first. I just feel bad for the young artists involved who really needed the aid of some experienced pros to keep them from making potentially career-defining mistakes.

To the cast and crew of After, I wish you luck. You can bounce back from this. Maybe stay away from whatever studio it was that allowed this into the world though.