After Midnight (2019)

Abby (Brea Grant), the life and work partner of small town bar owner Hank (Jeremy Gardner, who also co-directs), suddenly disappears from their house, leaving behind a note that’s too vague for a goodbye note but also not exactly promising a quick return. Hank loses himself in memories of better times, when things between the couple were simple because they were young and very acutely in love, so problem fields we’ll learn about later like Abby’s hatred of small town life and Hank’s own troubles with change and making decisions about his life didn’t really come up.

His bout of depression isn’t the only thing haunting Hank right now, though, for ever since Abby went away, he has had nightly visits by some kind of creature that wants to get into his – as is traditional – middle-of-nowhere house and clearly wants to do him harm. Not surprisingly, nobody in town believes any of Hank’s wild tales about the creature, so he has to try to fight it off alone, increasingly losing his grip on his sanity while doing so. How that’s going to turn out if and when Abby should return, and what will all of this do to their relationship?

For the longest time, I wasn’t at all sure about Jeremy Gardner’s and Christian Stella’s horror and romance movie After Midnight, feeling rather sceptical that the leisurely pace would ever let the film arrive at anything amounting to a point, and not too keen on watching yet another guy in a movie having very much self-caused relationship troubles, with a monster that only seemed to be in there to be a somewhat strained metaphor. Slowly, though, I began to appreciate how well, and sometimes funnily, the film drew Hank and his world, how elegantly the directors already implicated all the things that would become Abby’s and Hank’s relationship troubles in Hank’s happy flashbacks, just without Hank and the audience noticing at the time.

Once Abby returns, the film very much proves that all of what came before did indeed have a point, with some wonderful dialogue scenes now talking about the difficulties of love and relationships once the endorphin-driven parts of it are over and the parts start that can be rather a lot like work, Grant and Gardner doing great jobs keeping this believable, lively and real. Here, the film isn’t making the classic mistake of making one of the two the asshole of the relationship, even though it is clearly Hank who has to change if he wants to continue with Abby, instead working on letting the audience understand where each one is coming from; very atypical for a film from the last couple of years, it’s not about judgement and who is in the wrong but about what kind of compromise is viable for these two to stay together.

After that, the film makes utterly lovely use of a standard romance trope in an awkward family dinner scene that had me smiling like a loon, adds the perfect jump scare, and ends in a way that makes it impossible not to realize that the early film’s lengths were indeed in there for a reason, slowly preparing the ground for the rest of the film and trusting in the audience to be patient and have a bit of trust.


In the end, After Midnight, turns out to be the best horror/romance combo since Benson and Moorhead’s Spring (another film that takes a bit of time preparing the viewer). And wouldn’t you know it, those guys produced this film, Benson also taking an acting turn as Abby’s somewhat asshat-ish sheriff brother. That’s the perfect company for what turns out to be a quietly excellent little movie.