After Midnight (2020)

Rating: ⭐⭐½

I have to admit I am little dumbfounded as to how I can review this movie because of its unconventional mixing of a romantic breakup story with a monster movie. The film's title and promotional poster seem to suggest that this is a typical monster movie but watching the movies you would soon realised that it is far from just being an ordinary monster movie. The IMDB classified this under the genre - drama, horror and sci-fi!! The movie is also known by an alternative title "Something Else" which doesn't really help either in helping to describe what the whole thing is about. Its current title of "After Midnight" is never really explained so your guess is as good as mine.

Due to the shoe string budget, we never really get to see the monster until the final act. Even then, the sight of the monster is laughable as it looked more like someone wearing a badly conceived monster costume, and comes off hardly menacing. What transpired before then is a rather tragic tale of a breakup between two seemingly loving couple. The story of this element is as basic as the budget. Boy woes girl to live with him in a remote town. Girl disappears without a reason after 10 years. Boy gets depressed and gets nightly visit by an unseen and elusive monster. You will need a lot of patience to sit through the slow burn as nothing much basically happens. There are some nice dialogue and well acted emotional scenes which were pretty impressive but all this seem to be out of place with the laughable monster element looming in the background. One wonders if it would have worked better minus the whole monster thingy.

Watching movies with shoe string budget is not something I object to provided the director shows creativity and the we have a strong story with strong performances. You can make a movie with just one or two actors sitting in a room talking to each other and still come up with a masterpiece! So while After Midnight falls short of such stature, it at least has its moments so I would not totally dismiss this effort as fodder. Unlike the similarly low budgeted recent The Vast of Night which was annoying, frustrating and pretentious to watch. Nevertheless, this is not something I can recommend to anyone as not everybody would have the kind of patience to sit through this even though it has a mercifully short run time of under 90 minutes.