After Everything (2023) – Death To All Of Them

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 6th October
Seen: 6th October

The After franchise has become a nemesis of mine, a franchise I have a deep and profound hatred of that will never die. Every single time a new entry is released, the sound of my wail of pain can be heard around the block because it’s almost predetermined what is going to be put on the screen. Every film is an hour and a half of a depressingly demented toxic relationship with a blank sheet of paper that answers to the name of Tessa (Josephine Langford) and an abusive piece of excrement meant to resemble one of the biggest pop stars of our generation who answers to the name Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). Every time it’s a film of two people who shouldn’t be sharing time zones having an absurdly toxic and awful time, arguing constantly and breaking up their arguing with lackluster sex set to music chosen by a DJ who is high on ketamine and every time it’s just a bad time for anyone watching that has half a brain. 

Now the last film, After Ever Happy, ended with a potentially interesting idea, Hardin wrote a book about his and Tessa’s life (called “After” because this franchise thinks it’s so fucking clever) and Tessa reacted the way anyone should react when their most intimate secrets were put into print without their permission… She left Hardin and told him they were over. Surely that would either mean you end the franchise there or, if you must continue for some ungodly reason, you spend the next film with Hardin trying to make amends to Tessa for the vile things that he’s done to her. Of course, that’s what you do if you’re a good writer who understands basic story structure and how a half-decent romance should work… if you’re the people who made this piece of shit franchise you instead spend the entirety of your final film with one of your main characters MIA and try to redeem your asshole without having him actually deal with what he did. 

After Everything takes Hardin Scott away from Tessa for, no joke, over an hour of the film and places him in Lisbon (possibly because the franchise is filmed there and they just couldn’t be fucked trying to redecorate everything to look like another country) where Hardin runs into an old girlfriend. This girlfriend, Natalie (Mimi Keene), has her own history with Hardin and he wants to make amends for his past with her. For the next hour and change, Hardin goes between moping about Tessa, having flashbacks about their time together, hanging out with Natalie who has basically completely forgiven him for everything from the moment she sees him and dealing with writer’s block. This all culminates in the surprise wedding of Hardin’s brother which Hardin attends, sees Tessa for about 20 minutes and fixes everything up because why even bother implying that anyone can resist Hardin Scott for some reason.

It’s almost expected at this point that the After franchise just refuses to make Hardin Scott deal with the consequences of his actions but After Everything might be one of the worst about this, and that’s including After Ever Happy when he did a literal arson and never had to deal with it. Anything that Hardin has done to Tessa throughout the franchise is forgiven basically the instant they’re in the room together, he keeps missing deadlines for his second book and is somehow not sued into oblivion by his publisher (who apparently gave him 250,000 for a book… like he’s Stephen King or something) and the stuff he did to Natalie is so objectively vile that it should mean he gets shunned instantly but instead she just forgives him right away and acts like a schoolgirl with a crush.

What did he do to Natalie, you might ask… oh, he just filmed the two of them having sex and sent it to a friend who then put it on the web, thus humiliating her and putting her through the kind of emotional torment that is considered revenge porn in some states. Something like that should not get forgiveness, that’s the kind of thing that should end with genitalia being cut off while you sleep. It’s a truly cruel act and thankfully it’s presented as such in After Everything, but by the time it’s presented to us, so the audience has the full backstory, we’ve also seen that Natalie is just having a fun old time with a man who can’t help but violate people’s privacy. Hardin Scott literally violated Natalie’s privacy in a way that’s actually criminal, and she buys him a fucking smoothie for it because apparently he’s just that fucking charming.

Speaking of that backstory, an upsetting amount of After Everything is just flashbacks to previous films in the franchise. Everything gets a mild bit of recontextualisation in order to at least attempt to come across as though it was romantic this entire time and maybe if you hadn’t seen the previous films in the franchise you might be able to buy it… unfortunately, I have seen the last four films in the franchise and nothing presented is anything close to romantic. It’s an abuser rewriting his own abuses of privacy into charming cute moments that are supposedly delightfully whimsical. If you were to remove every single flashback from the film it would be a shock if the film lasted a full 80 minutes, but then Josephine Langford would barely be in the damn film at all and they have to pretend that this is all about how much Hardin wants to win Tessa back somehow.

It must be repeated every single time you think about this franchise, Hardin Scott is meant to be Harry Styles which is why any of this behavior is excused in the narrative. It’s a Harry Styles fanfiction that they filed the name off of so they could publish it without having to get permission but the problem with that is that once you do that you lose the context. People like Harry Styles, he seems like a nice person and thus a story about him as a bad boy comes with the context of knowing it’s not the only thing about him. His reputation creates a barrier that allows the worst elements to be somewhat forgivable… that’s not the case with Hardin Scott, Hardin is a fucking arsonist sex pest who should be in jail for the next 30 years.

What is perhaps most annoying is that, if you don’t have the context of the previous films to help inform how you look at the main character, After Everything is just boring the entire way through up until the final wedding scene when it turns into its ultimate shitshow that anyone honest would expect this thing to turn into. We spend over an hour following the world’s most irritating manchild going about, complaining about how much he hates smoothies and getting into drunken fights while occasionally fantasising about fucking a flight attendant. Once again, the more time we spend with Hardin Scott the easier it is to hate him because he is a contemptible piece of shit who deserves pain and suffering. 

There’s also the reality that, after what happened at the end of the last movie, this movie spends most of its runtime with Hardin begging for forgiveness from someone other than Tessa. Instead of dealing with the things that this franchise has set up, it invents a whole new backstory that must be atoned for. Sure, we’ve just spent four films watching Hardin abuse Tessa to the point of publishing intimate secrets in a best-selling book (I still can’t believe that’s a plot point and that the film makes it out like After is some great best seller that’s changed the lives of people) but why bother spending any time trying to make things right with her? After all, this is Tessa and Hardin, they’ll just fuck once and everything’ll be absolutely fine because why should a character have anything resembling a spine? This is possibly the worst version of the “I can fix him” plot that’s ever been put to film because normally, bare minimum, the guy shows some reason to be worth a damn… there is no reason to want Hardin Scott in your life. There is plenty of reasons to want him six feet under (HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT I DO NOT LIKE THIS CHARACTER YET!?)

After Everything had the slimmest chance to maybe try and do something bold and actually hold its main character to account for what he’s done over the course of the franchise but instead chooses to double down, gaslight the audience by telling them that everything we’ve seen was actually very romantic and gives Hardin Scott a happy ending that he does not deserve. This character deserves to have a meeting with Detectives Benson and Stabler, and not just because of the literal arson (no, seriously, last film the character did an arson and there has never been any repurcussions for this, someone explain that shit)

Shocking absolutely no one, After Everything is absolute trash and if we’re very fucking lucky the production company was being honest when they said this was the end of the franchise. No more is needed, they should’ve stopped after the first movie (hell, they should’ve stopped BEFORE the first movie). It’s another hour and a half with annoying characters who don’t grow up so much as revert back to where they were roughly two films ago. Badly written, badly acted, just bad all around on every possible level. If this is truly over, thank fucking God. The only time I ever want to have to talk about this franchise again is in 2 months when it gets its inevitable spot on the worst list. Fuck this movie, fuck this franchise, fuck Hardin Fucking Scott.