Review of After Hours (1985) by Clelie R — 07 May 2008

So I went into this thinking it was supposed to be a fun, dark comedy. I came out exhausted and emotionally drained. I can't think of another movie that is able to put the viewer in the head of the protagonist so completely--but then again, it is Martin Scorsese we're talking about here.

The story is fairly simple--Paul (Griffin Dunne), a lonely word processor, meets a woman at a diner (Rosanna Arquette) that he seems to connect with. He gets her number and later that night calls her. She wants him to come over. So he travels from his home on the upper east side of Manhattan to SoHo to meet her. And then things go incredibly, disastrously wrong. It's a credit to Scorsese's talent that although this is in the end kind of a comedy (it is genuinely funny) it works as well as any thriller I've ever seen (perhaps even better--I can't remember feeling as much genuine anxiety and paranoia during a movie as I did here). It walks the razor's edge between comedy and horror and doesn't slip once. So I'm giving this a perfect score because it succeeds with flying colors on pretty much every level it tried to, although its lack of scope and ambition keep it from Scorsese's greatest. But then again, that kind of grandiosity wouldn't fit very well with this kind of movie. Either way, it's by far Scorsese's most underrated.