In a happy place only if After’s toxic melodrama ends
‘IJames Croot ★
f two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.’’ This Ernest Hemingway quote from 1932’s Death in the Afternoon is cited at least twice during the tepid, turgid melodrama that is this fourth outing in what is perhaps the worst film franchise of the 21st century.
Apart from the ongoing pretension of the high literary allusions that pepper the otherwise pulpy proceedings – last time, our heroine reached for a copy of The Great Gatsby straight after a fight and the protagonists have compared themselves to Jane Austen characters a number of times – there’s the distinctly uncomfortable and unedifying unfolding and often unravelling of one of the most toxic relationships ever projected onto a screen.
Incredibly audiences have now endured more than 400 minutes of this disastrous pairing. They make the couples in Twilight and Fifty
Shades of Grey seem perfectly compatible and well-adjusted by comparison.
So it’s out of pure concern for the audience’s wellbeing that I address After Ever Happy’s biggest crime – and no, it’s not that no-one actually gets punished for burning down a London house in the opening moments.
Despite early assurances that this was the last film in the series, it’s not. The torment will continue for another round. My hopes of Breaking Dawn: Part II-esque carnage failed to eventuate.
Instead, it’s the torpid continuation of the seemingly never-ending petulant breakups and hot-and-heavy makeups.
Bulgaria this time stands in for London, Seattle and New York, as Tessa (Josephine Langford) and her bad boy British beau Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) bicker and whine, dither and pine over each other.
There are family crises to deal with, painful pasts to reconcile and duvet days and therapy required, but this is a film where neither of the main characters actually seems to do anything, although Tessa does bizarrely seem to abandon her publishing career for hospitality.
To be fair to Langford, neither she nor Tessa are really this series’ biggest problem. You could argue it’s the source material – Anna Todd’s truly terrible literary series that started life as ‘‘Harry Styles fan fiction’’ – but Fiennes Tiffin’s Hardin really is truly ‘‘ugly’’, irredeemable and an emotional vampire.
When he’s not gaslighting Tessa, he’s blaming everyone else for his troubles, hitting the hard liquor or enduring ‘‘night terrors’’ (scenes that were met with titters from the small audience who endured the same screening as me). If you thought Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith was the epitome of a man-child and bad boyfriend, you haven’t seen an After movie (lucky you).
Among the wreckage of the narrative and dialogue, returning director Castille Landon does at least manage a few visual flourishes (a nice time-lapse here, some smart framing there), but by the time Hardin reveals what we’ve known has been coming for four films, you just want the end credits to roll.
After Ever Happy is screening now in cinemas nationwide.