After Darkness (2014)
(On Cable TV, May 2020) Before getting into the meat of this review, let’s clear up one thing: What some movie sites call After Darkness (2019) (sometimes 2018) is known as After Darkness (2014) on IMDB, so that’s what I’m going with—it’s not rare for disappointing low-budget movies to be widely released in the United States a while after production, but the five-year gap between its 2014 Singapore DVD release and 2019 US video release is significant enough to cause confusion. What’s even more unfortunate is that this release delay is by far the most interesting thing about After Darkness, an almost-theatrical dining table post-apocalyptic drama about a rich family cooped up in their mansion while waiting for rescue after the extinction of the sun. The mansion is well lit and temperatures seem to be holding up nicely considering the now-eternal night, but if you’re looking for scientific rigour here, you’re going to be disappointed when elementary plausibility itself seems to elude the filmmakers. While the impending apocalypse means a definitive ending to the film, this isn’t anywhere near von Trier’s similar Melancholia in terms of dramatic tension: as the script throws in the expected tropes (family tensions, last-minute relationship rifts, crazy mom, additional guests, home invasion, home birth, extinguished hope), it doesn’t feel intense as much as perfunctory. Sure, the overprotective father is a worse threat than the blown-out sun or armed intruders, but so what? Everyone’s going to die, and while After Darkness does some crazy tap-dancing to avoid showing the inevitability of the ending it’s pursuing, it’s still not particularly edifying nor enjoyable. It’s directed with a certain comfy elegance by Batán Silva, except when the matter turns nasty and unpleasant. Still, I go back to the conclusion as proof of After Darkness’s creative hollowness: if your point is to show how characters crack under the worst pressure imaginable (the inevitable end of everything), then go with them to the final moments—don’t chicken out with a narcotics-induced hallucination that makes everything falsely pretty. If I want existential depression, I’m going back for von Trier next time. At least he knows what he’s doing. And his movies don’t get shelved for years before being released.