Review of The Aftermath (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Aftermath never claimed to be anything more than its modest trailer: a fiery forbidden romance between a British housewife and a suspected Nazi in post-war Germany. It’s a little more feelsy than, say, Lady Macbeth, but it’s hard to imagine it aspiring to anything so great. It’s good to see Jason Clarke getting work out there (the week before Pet Sematary‘s remake).

This movie did a better job of hiding some central tensions from the audience in its trailer than we expected. I won’t go into too much detail because this movie isn’t plot heavy enough to withstand too much of an analysis without revealing a lot of the action of the movie entirely, but at a certain point it dawned on me that we were watching the story of three very understanding people coping with an awkward relationship more than a period piece about the aftermath of the Second World War.

The first half of this film is a fairly exciting story: insurgent attacks, illicit sex, and German jokes at Keira Knightley’s expense. As things progress, the story falls into the tracks of a more conventional romance. Wife mentioned at one crucial point in the climax that she had been suspecting something would happen with the daughter’s allegiance to an organization that would reveal her to be more duplicitous than she seemed after the makeover scene. She says that the scene on the frozen river after the car ride back from the party was so unexpected and disorienting that she could have believed any permutation of the scene to play out, which seems like high praise. She also really liked the twisty ending.