After opens on a dorm room, a mother, and a boyfriend carrying boxes. Tessa Young is a dedicated student and a dutiful daughter, moving into her first year of college with her high school sweetheart, Noah, at her side. Within days she meets Hardin Scott, a brooding rebel who tells her he does not date and then kisses her at a lake anyway. Jenny Gage directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Susan McMartin, Tamara Chestna, and Tom Betterton, working from Anna Todd’s 2014 novel. It runs 106 minutes. It is the first installment in the After film series, and it is a bad movie.
Trailer, via Aviron Pictures.
Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes Tiffin
The film rests on its two leads, and the leads are the least of its problems. Josephine Langford plays Tessa, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays Hardin. Both are asked to carry a romance built almost entirely out of sullen looks and sudden reversals, and neither is given a scene that explains why these two people want each other.
Tessa arrives guarded. She is loyal to Noah, serious about her classes, and unused to the party her roommate drags her to. Hardin arrives mysterious. That is the whole of him. The screenplay never supplies a reason for his cruelty beyond a vague air of damage, and it never supplies a reason for Tessa’s patience beyond the fact that the plot requires it.
The supporting cast is large and mostly wasted. Selma Blair plays Carol Young, Tessa’s mother. Peter Gallagher plays Ken Scott, Hardin’s father. Jennifer Beals plays Karen Gibson, Landon’s mother. Shane Paul McGhie plays Landon Gibson, the classmate who explains that he and Hardin are soon to become stepbrothers. Each of these actors gets a handful of scenes and no arc.
A Party, a Lake, and a Bonfire
The plot moves through a series of set pieces that never build. Steph, Tessa’s roommate, persuades her to attend a party. The group plays truth or dare, which reveals Tessa’s virginity; she is dared to kiss Hardin and refuses. Later at the same party he tries to kiss her, and she leaves.
- A class debate, after which Hardin insists they start over
- A trip to a nearby lake, where Hardin kisses Tessa and says they cannot remain only friends
- A diner encounter with Molly and Zed, after which Tessa promises to tell Noah about the kiss
- Noah’s surprise visit and an evening around a bonfire
- A game of suck and blow at the bonfire party, where Jace deliberately fails in order to kiss Tessa
- A physical confrontation that follows, with Hardin jealous
- A drunken rage in which Hardin destroys the house, and a call from Landon that pulls Tessa away from a sleeping Noah
That is the shape of the film: provocation, apology, provocation. Tessa comforts Hardin after he wrecks a house. She kisses him. She stays by his side to help him sleep. The next morning she returns to her dorm to check on Noah, and the film treats this as a crossroads rather than what it is, which is a mess.
The Problem With Hardin Scott
The critical case against After is that it glamorizes an abusive relationship, and the film does not argue with that case. Hardin’s behavior is possessive, volatile, and at one point destructive. The story frames his jealousy as passion and his rages as wounds. Tessa’s job, scene after scene, is to absorb them.
After your first, life is never the same.
That is the film’s tagline, and it is doing more work than the screenplay does. The line promises transformation. What the film delivers is a girl who keeps choosing the boy who treats her badly, and a camera that keeps insisting this is romance.
None of this is subtle enough to be dangerous in the way a better film might be. After is not seductive. It is dull. The lake scene, the bonfire, the wrecked house — each arrives, plays out, and ends without changing what Tessa wants or who Hardin is. By the final act the two of them are exactly where they started, only louder.
Selma Blair, Peter Gallagher, and the Adults
The adults in After exist to be obstacles or absences. Carol Young is the mother who wants her daughter to stay on track. Ken Scott is the father Hardin resents. Karen Gibson is the mother about to marry him. Landon is the stepbrother-to-be who serves as the film’s only reasonable voice.
There is a version of this movie where the blended-family thread carries real weight, where Hardin’s anger has a source and Tessa’s choices have a cost. After does not make that movie. It mentions the engagement, mentions the fathers, and moves on to the next party.
The casting history is more interesting than the result. Julia Goldani Telles was originally cast as Tessa alongside Fiennes Tiffin, then left the production in July 2018 because of scheduling conflicts. Josephine Langford replaced her that same month. Anna Todd, who wrote the novel, said of Langford that she “knew right away that was Tessa.”
Two characters were changed from male to female for the film. Pia Mia plays Tristan, and producer Meadow Williams plays Professor Soto. The film does almost nothing with either change.
A $14 Million Budget and $69 Million
After premiered at The Grove in Los Angeles on April 8, 2019, and opened in the United States on April 12 through Aviron Pictures. It grossed over $69 million worldwide against a $14 million budget. A sequel, After We Collided, followed in 2020.
That gap between cost and return is the real story of After. The film was made cheaply, sold to an audience that already knew the book, and turned a profit regardless of what anyone wrote about it. Reviews were negative, and the specific complaint — that the screenplay and the narrative glamorize an abusive relationship — is the correct one.
But the commercial math explains why the series continued and the reviews explain why it should not have. A movie can be profitable and still be this thin. After is proof.
What actually matters here is not the box office and not the sequel. It is that a film about a young woman’s first months of college cannot be bothered to show her learning anything. Tessa begins the movie guarded and ends it devoted to a man who has given her no reason to be. The screenplay mistakes that for an ending.
The performances are not the failure. Langford is fine. Fiennes Tiffin is fine. The failure is structural: a romance needs two people, and After has one person and one mood. The bonfire, the lake, the truth-or-dare circle — these are events, not a relationship. Nothing in them earns the tagline, and nothing in them earns a second film.
The part worth watching, if any, is the gap between what After wants to be and what it is. It wants to be a story about a first love that rearranges a life. It is a story about a girl who keeps answering the phone.
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