Roger Kumble’s After We Collided runs 105 minutes and asks whether love can overcome the past. The film’s answer is no, and neither can it.
The sequel to 2019’s After brings back Josephine Langford as Tessa Young and Hero Fiennes Tiffin as Hardin Scott, the couple whose relationship powered the first film’s modest success. This time the production has more money, a bigger supporting cast and a screenplay credited to Anna Todd and Mario Celaya. What it does not have is a single scene that treats its two leads as people rather than as weather systems colliding on a schedule.
Trailer, via Voltage Pictures.
A Seattle Internship and a Drunk Dial
The plot picks up with Hardin reflecting on the breakup. He meets a homeless man, rebuffs him when the man tries to ask a question, and moves on. That encounter is the closest the film comes to a theme.
Tessa starts as an intern at Vance Publishing. She shares an awkward encounter with coworker Trevor Matthews, played by Dylan Sprouse. Her work impresses Christian Vance, the company’s owner, who takes Tessa, Trevor and his secretary and girlfriend Kimberly to a Seattle-area work event. Charlie Weber plays Vance; Candice King plays Kimberly.
At a nightclub, Tessa and Trevor network with a businessman considering an investment in Vance. Tessa drunk-dials Hardin, who tracks her down. He arrives at her hotel room to find a half-dressed Trevor, whose clothes were drying after Tessa accidentally spilt wine on them.
Hardin kicks Trevor out. He and Tessa fight, then have sex. The next morning they fight again before she and Trevor leave with Vance, who tells his interns he has secured financing from the businessman.
That sequence is the film in miniature. A man and a woman alternate between cruelty and intimacy with no interval for thought, and the camera treats the pattern as passion rather than as a problem. Kumble stages it cleanly enough. The trouble is the script, which gives the actors nothing to play except volume.
Trish Explains Hardin
Tessa and Hardin each come to regret ending the relationship. When Tessa returns to the apartment she shared with Hardin to retrieve belongings, he steps in with his mother Trish, who believes they are still dating. Louise Lombard plays Trish.
Tessa plays along and finds she enjoys spending time with both of them. Then Trish reveals the source of Hardin’s issues: he was traumatized after watching her get violently raped by men to whom his father Ken owed money when he was a boy. Rob Estes plays Ken.
This is the film’s attempt at depth, and it is the most serious miscalculation in it. A past trauma is handed over as an explanation for present behavior, delivered in a single scene, and then the movie moves on to the next argument. Nothing about Hardin changes because of it. Nothing about how Tessa sees him changes either. The revelation functions as backstory paperwork.
Can love overcome the past?
The tagline is the film’s own question, and the film never answers it because it never lets the past be anything but a device.
Tessa’s Birthday and Her Mother’s House
On her birthday, Tessa visits her mother Carol’s house and encounters her ex-boyfriend Noah. Selma Blair plays Carol. The two let slip that Tessa’s father, absent for years, had tried to find her, and that her mother sent him away. Tessa takes this as a betrayal. She goes back to Hardin’s apartment and starts the relationship up again.
On Christmas Day, Hardin, Tessa and Trish attend a holiday party.
That is the shape of the whole movie: a betrayal, a reunion, a party. The film keeps arranging its characters into rooms and letting them collide, and it never asks what any of them want beyond the next scene. Tessa’s father is introduced as a wound and then dropped. Noah appears and vanishes. Trevor exists to make Hardin jealous, and Sprouse plays him with a straight-faced patience the script does not deserve.
What the Supporting Cast Is Given
The cast list is long and mostly decorative. Shane Paul McGhie plays Landon Gibson. Inanna Sarkis plays Molly Samuels. Samuel Larsen plays Zed Evans. Khadijha Red Thunder plays Steph Jones. Each gets a handful of lines and no arc.
Todd, who wrote the source novel and co-wrote the screenplay, has a brief cameo as a club patron. It is the most honest moment in the film: the author stepping briefly into her own creation, then leaving.
The production values are a step up from After. The Seattle setting gives the film a working city instead of a campus, and the Vance Publishing office and the nightclub are staged with enough texture to suggest a real world. The film looks like it cost more than its predecessor, and it did.
The Numbers Behind After We Collided
- Runtime: 105 minutes
- Budget: $14 million
- Worldwide gross: $48 million
- Metacritic: 14/100
- European premiere: September 2, 2020
- US release: October 23, 2020, in theaters and on video-on-demand, by Open Road Films
- Sequel: After We Fell, released 2021
A Box Office Success With Nothing to Say
After We Collided grossed $48 million worldwide against a $14 million budget. By any commercial measure, that is a success, and it is why After We Fell arrived in 2021. The audience for this series showed up, and the film was released simultaneously in theaters and on video-on-demand in the United States on October 23, 2020, during a period when that combination was one of the few ways to reach viewers at all.
The critical reception was negative, as it was for After, with many reviewers criticizing the screenplay and the film’s glamourized portrayal of toxic relationships. That criticism is correct, and it is not a matter of taste. The film stages a relationship in which a man kicks a half-dressed man out of a hotel room, fights with his girlfriend, has sex with her, and fights with her again the next morning, and it presents the sequence as the turbulence of true love. The camera lingers on the reconciliation. It never lingers on the cost.
What makes the film worth discussing is not its quality but its mechanism. It takes a trauma — Trish’s rape, witnessed by her son — and converts it into a reason for a man to behave badly. That is a choice, and it is the kind of choice that shapes how a young audience understands what a relationship is supposed to feel like. The film’s fans are not wrong to find something in it. Langford and Fiennes Tiffin have a real charge between them, and the movie is at its most watchable when it simply lets them argue in a hallway.
But charge is not character. The screenplay, by Todd and Celaya, moves its people from fight to bed to fight without ever letting them think. Tessa’s internship, her mother’s secret, her father’s disappearance — each is introduced and abandoned. The film is 105 minutes of incident with no accumulation.
After We Collided is the second installment in the After film series, and it is a sequel that repeats its predecessor’s mistakes with a larger budget and a longer cast list. The first film’s problems were the problems of a modest production. This one’s are the problems of a franchise that has decided its audience will accept a trauma as a plot point and a fight as a love scene.
It will not be remembered as a romance. It will be remembered as a case study in how a film can be a hit and still have nothing to say. The score is 1.4 of 10, matching the published critical score.
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