After Everything: The good part is that it ends
After five films, countless embarrassing scenes, fights, more daring scenes, trips, and confusion, the After franchise seems to be coming to an end with After: Forever (After Everything, 2023).
With a story that was mostly squeezed from a lemon in a bar to make a caipirinha, After: Forever serves to close a cycle, trim some ends, and finish a story arc that in the end seems to have never been about Josephine Langford’s Tessa, but rather about Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and his toxic, and sometimes abusive, masculine behavior at different times.
Hero Fiennes Tiffin in a scene from After: Forever.
The good part about After: Forever is that after all this, the franchise really seems to end. Of course, the new film delivers in 1h30 minutes what seems to be the last few hours of the franchise’s history, but here it seems to last an eternal 3 hours of film. It was as if we were watching Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour film about the atomic bomb, except in this case, the bomb is the film itself.
And After: Forever follows the story after Tessa breaks up for the 20th time with Hardin, the confident skinny guy who enters a new spiral of bad decisions, goes back to drinking, and of course assumes his angry bad boy persona again. But now the owner of a best-selling book, and with a $250,000 advance that his manager wants him to return if After 2 doesn’t materialize, Hardin decides to do some self-reflection and sort out the issues of the past.
So, at the same speed as he downs glasses of whiskey, the character now assumes the role of protagonist and buys a ticket to Portugal (not even Ibiza, in Spain, or another more lively European city) and leaves for his version of Eating, Pray and Love.
For fans, we have already warned that this film is a Hardin film, about Hardin, and that the plot revolves around Hardin. It’s as if Edward from the Twilight franchise took on the role of protagonist instead of Bella Swan and had his own film. I think the author even made a book about it, but of course it was years after the films came out and freed Robert Pattinson from this mess.
After all, here, in After: Forever, it seems that Langford said: I’m not going to spend my whole life playing this character, in the best Meredith Gray style in Grey’s Anatomy, and told the production to find scenes from the other films to put in this one, he was completely in your home, and life that follows. If Tessa appears 10 minutes and After: Forever is a lot.
And when she appears, Longford always has the worst possible wig, the worst costume, the worst makeup. It seems that not even those who worked on the film wanted the actress to look good and presentable in the last film in the franchise. So, perhaps, thinking coldly, it was better that After: Forever had the focus on Hardin himself, on his story and on this emotional journey that the character goes through.
Thus, the film develops like a snail’s pace, between several scenes of the character (shirtless, of course!) in front of the computer with author’s block and with a manuscript to deliver. With at least the backdrop of Portuguese beach landscapes, we meet young Natalie (Mimi Keene) who has crossed paths with Hardin in the past. What could be a new detour on the journey for Tessa and Hardin to get together, serves more as a way of giving some complexity to the already shallow development that the character has had throughout the films, and why he is so tormented and everything. .
It felt like a giant detour to show what the character was doing in the time period after breaking up with Tessa. Thus, Natalie serves more as a character to help Hardin apologize to the people he hurt when he was young and also show how he has evolved as a person and then be able to return to having a healthy relationship either with himself or with others.
Of course, in the meantime, the character continues to participate in beach parties with Natalie and her friends, which provide the only good joke in the film (that Harry Styles should play Hardin in the film version based on his book), fights with others guys (also shirtless), and of course, conversations with his father (Stephen Moyer still with bills to pay) on the city streets.
Fiennes Tiffin has improved a lot over the years compared to the first film, and impressively holds his own for the 1 hour or so of the film. Langford enters apathetically and leaves silently and it’s really impossible to say that she’s in the film, even though she appears on the poster that already hints at the couple’s future. The various other names that the franchise had, even known to the public of teen productions, such as Chance Perdomo (from the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series), Kiana Madeira (The Thieves) also appear, very quickly and kiss and goodbye.
Castille Landon’s direction seems to work miracles when it doesn’t need to focus on the couple making out, but even so it seems so simplistic that it doesn’t really stand out at any point.
From the fever on social media, to book fans not embracing the feature films in theaters, but devouring them on streaming, in the end, the After franchise shows that actually making some money is better than making none. And as we said, the best part of After: Forever is when the credits roll after we see a snippet of what the future has in store for Tessa and Hardin.
