After Everything

I remember when the first After movie dropped in 2019. It felt like a fever dream born from the deepest, thirstiest corners of Wattpad—essentially a Harry Styles fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. Fast forward to 2023, and we’ve reached After Everything, the fifth and supposedly final installment in a saga that has outstayed its welcome more than a roommate who "forgot" their rent for three months. I watched this while sitting on a sofa that has one spring poking into my left hip, and honestly, that mild physical discomfort was the perfect companion for Hardin Scott’s latest brooding session.

A Franchise Running on Fumes

In the current landscape of contemporary cinema, we talk a lot about "franchise fatigue." Usually, we’re complaining about superheroes or Jedi, but the After series represents a different kind of exhaustion: the mid-budget, streaming-era romance that refuses to end. Hero Fiennes Tiffin returns as Hardin, the man with more tattoos than personality traits, and this time he’s suffering from writer's block and a "Tessa-shaped hole" in his heart.

The weirdest thing about After Everything is that Josephine Langford, the other half of the "Hessa" engine, is barely in the movie. It’s a romance sequel where the leading lady is essentially a ghost in the machine. Instead of the toxic-but-magnetic chemistry that fueled the earlier films, we get Hardin moping around Lisbon. He’s there to apologize to Nathalie (Mimi Keene), a girl whose life he ruined years ago. It’s a redemption arc that feels less like growth and more like a mandatory checklist. Mimi Keene, who many of us know and love from Sex Education, does her absolute best with a script that treats her like a plot device to make Hardin look "complicated."

The Lisbon Filter and Narrative Bloat

Director Castille Landon—who also stepped in to write this chapter—clearly loves the scenery. Portugal looks gorgeous, drenched in that golden, late-summer light that makes everything look like a luxury travel ad. But the movie treats Lisbon like a giant Instagram filter meant to distract us from the fact that nothing is actually happening. Hardin walks. Hardin drinks. Hardin stares at a typewriter like it’s a personal enemy.

The dialogue often feels like it was generated by an AI that was fed nothing but Nicholas Sparks B-sides and Tumblr quotes from 2014. When Hardin isn't whispering about his pain, the film relies on a soundtrack of generic indie-pop to tell us how to feel. In this era of cinema, where we’ve seen brilliant, nuanced dramas about messy young adulthood, After Everything feels like a relic. It’s a drama where the conflict is solved by the sheer power of the protagonist being handsome, and that’s a hard sell in 2023.

Behind the Scenes and the Obscurity Factor

Interestingly, this fifth film wasn't even based on one of Anna Todd’s original novels. It was a surprise addition, announced by Hero Fiennes Tiffin (who also produced) as a way to "wrap things up." The budget sat at a modest $14 million, but it barely scraped back $10 million at the box office. That’s the reality of the post-pandemic streaming pivot; most of the audience for this franchise had already moved on to watching it on demand, leaving the theatrical release to wither.

There’s a bit of trivia that explains why the movie feels so disconnected from the rest of the series: it was filmed back-to-back with the fourth movie in Bulgaria and Portugal, likely to save costs while the iron was still lukewarm. You can feel the rush. The scenes with Stephen Moyer and Louise Lombard feel like they were squeezed in during a lunch break. It’s a "hidden" movie in the sense that unless you were a die-hard fan waiting for the VOD drop, it probably bypassed your radar entirely. It’s the kind of film that will live forever in the "Recommended for You" section of a streaming app, never quite finding the cultural footprint of its predecessors.

A Finale Without a Spark

The biggest issue I have—and I say this as someone who unironically enjoyed the messy chaos of the first two films—is the lack of emotional payoff. Drama lives and breathes on the "earn." If a character is going to change, I want to see the sweat. Hardin’s journey here feels unearned. He spends ninety minutes being a walking red flag with a British accent, and then we are expected to buy into a grand finale that feels tacked on like a post-script.

Hero Fiennes Tiffin is a capable actor, but he’s been playing "Hardin" for five years now, and you can see the fatigue in his eyes. He’s outgrown the leather jacket, both literally and figuratively. The film has the emotional depth of a puddle in a drought, and while that might work for a quick 5-minute distraction, it makes for a frustrating feature-length experience. For a series that started as a vibrant, if problematic, explosion of Gen Z romance, it ends with a quiet, confused whimper in a Portuguese hotel room.

Ultimately, After Everything is for the completionists only. It’s a movie that exists because the contracts were signed and the locations were booked, rather than because there was a burning story left to tell. If you’re a fan of the series, you’ll watch it for the closure, but don’t expect the sparks that made "Hessa" a thing in the first place. It’s a beautiful-looking postcard from a franchise that forgot to write a message on the back.