After We're Over

Incredibly boring film. Slow pacing, little character development, stock cliché lines. It's like if you overheard the most boring, uninteresting, middle-class couple in a restaurant and decided to follow them around for an hour and 20 minutes and listen in on their inane conversation and superficial problems. The writer tries too hard to make their dialogue seem "natural", but it just gives the whole thing this uncanny/cringey feeling of overacting and drama.

It turns out the 'writer'/'director' is from St. Louis, so a lot of the film comes of as a way for him to show off the city, like everything is a big cameo of well-known St Louis places and cultural references, at the expense of any actual plot or narrative devices. That pretty much solves the mystery of how this won the "audience choice award" there; name drop any city enough and the residents will eat it up.

The performances are stunningly genuine. The story is incredibly relatable. The cinematography is epic. The score is beautiful. The editing is engrossing.

The movie explores the complexity of relationships, the baggage we bring to them, and the importance of self-love. As an architect, I adored the layering of St Louis's history, the impacts of redlining, and using our shared history to find individual paths forward. As a takeaway, I'm inspired to do more and take more for myself. I only have amazing reviews for After We're Over and need to plan a trip to St. Louis. Cause truly, where else can you find a bus hanging from a building?

I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this film - from the script to the acting and the editing to the cinematography, every piece of this film worked. While there are really only two actors, the city of St. Louis takes up all the space the rest of an ensemble cast would occupy. Although this is a film about love, lost and found, that message of love transcends the boundaries of dialogue and is extended to the setting. Anyone who has been in a failed relationship or two will instantly identify and experience an immediate empathy for the protagonist(s) in this deeply human movie - I highly recommend!

This felt like the relationship version of Memento--it was an earnest and heartfelt look at the two distinct phases of a relationship--the beginning of the love, and the beginning of the moving on. Closure can take a lot of different forms, and the relationships in After We're Over are no different. The characters, what they're looking for, what they wind up finding--they're all very nuanced--in the writing and the performances. The structure felt really stream-of-consciousness, so if you're a stickler for the paint by numbers style storytelling, this isn't for you. But you should open your mind--you might find gems like this. Also, of particular note, the soundtrack was absolutely incredible.

I really enjoyed this film! While it's an indie, the cinematography looks excellent, and the score was really well crafted also. I love a good romance story, and I think there are piece of this that anyone can relate to. Overall, definitely plays like a Drama, but also has some funny and cute moments peppered in. The formatting is also really cool in regards to flashbacks and how they're used to interrupt the linear storytelling in regards to specific locations. Really enjoyed that aspect of it as well.

I also really enjoyed that it was set in St. Louis, which is an awesome city and I can't recall many (if any) other films that are set there. Overall, a great watch and definitely I film I could see myself re-watching again down the line.