Claire leads a quiet life in Rome with her talented teenage daughter Robin. An accomplished pianist studying at a Catholic school, Robin’s world is turned upside down after a tragic bike accident leaves her clinically dead.
Against all odds, Robin returns to life, but she emerges severely changed from her brush with mortality. As Robin acts more sullen and volatile, Claire fears some unseen tormentor has followed her child back from beyond.
Directed by Robert Salerno and starring Connie Britton as the desperate mother, Here After explores a haunting supernatural scenario. While Salerno shows flashes of visual flair, much of the film takes a sadly familiar horror path.
Relying heavily on worn genre tropes, it struggles to craft complex characters or relationships to hold viewers’ interest through the longer moments. Its emotional finale hints at greater depth left largely untapped in the journey there.
Meeting the Characters
Claire is a devoted mother, deeply rattled by what’s happened to Robin. As an English teacher living in Rome, she dotes on her daughter and supports her musical talents. But after the accident, nothing seems sure. She’s distraught by Robin’s dark changes and desperate to understand the sinister force shaping the girl now. With patience and love, Claire refuses to give up on reaching her child within.
Before tragedy struck, Robin appeared a typical cheerful teen. Her gift for piano shone through, even with her creative use of signs to communicate. The loss of her sister hung heavy, yet Robin’s sunny spirit still found ways to brighten the day. But the accident seems to have torn something vital from her very soul. Now Robin meets the world with aloof disinterest, or worse, bursts of chilling wrath so unlike her former self.
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Robin’s transformation leaves everyone baffled, especially her mother. Where once a nurturing bond existed, now lay an impenetrable divide neither truly understands. As Robin’s acts grow more disturbing, is this still the girl Claire knew? Or has an evil foreigner to this world ensnared her child? Faced with losing Robin completely, Claire must penetrate the darkness to find what, if anything, remains of the daughter she cherished.
Though the film centers on Claire and Robin’s turmoil, other characters touch their lives. Luca, Robin’s father, and new wife offer little aid. Viv brings Claire fellowship, but none truly grasp her plight. Only Doctor Ben listens with empathy enough to matter. For the others, this harrowing situation defies explanation. But for Claire, understanding what happened to Robin means the difference between hope and utter despair.
Exploring the Visuals
The film’s conclusion breathtakingly directed hints at greater potential. As Claire delves into her trauma, the sequence takes flight with stirring cinematography. Sharpening the focus on one pivotal character during such an introspective moment taps deep wells of emotion. This moving visual feast shows what might have been with bolder storytelling throughout to match.
Alas, most of Here After presents more familiarly. Relying on worn genre building blocks like disturbed children and fleeting mysticism, it fails to break new ground. From Robin’s strange behavior to haunted church halls, the scare scenes feel like relics audiences have seen too many times to startle. More is needed to engage beyond quick thrills, yet the film doesn’t deliver deeper chills or understanding to linger with viewers.
Visually, the autumnal city spreads around the characters like a postcard. Lush landscapes capture Rome in all its amber-lit beauty. Within these frames, however, lies missed potential for capturing the psychological complexity of loss and faith. While paying lovely tribute to the setting, the framing overall does little to energize flat characters or narrative beats that leave minds wandering rather than bodies shaking. A few picturesque shots alone can’t fulfill what the best horror spreads across its entire intricate tapestry.
Exploring the Ethereal
Here After takes on weighty subjects like loss and the afterlife’s mysteries. It seeks to shine light on grief’s shadows and familial bonds’ power to heal old wounds. Yet for all its ambition, the film spreads its focus too thin.
Briefly, the film surfaces fascinating notions of death’s unknowns and love’s ability to span realities. But fleshing out its people proves less priority than planted jolts. As characters stay strangers, their spiritual searches lack meaning. We see traumatic scenes’ impacts instead of healing’s slow work within.
Where thrills stand alone as plots’ drivers, overarching questions fade to background noise. Glimpses of faith transforming pain into purpose drown amid lumbering reveals. A story promising soul-baring insight delivers popcorn jumps alone.
With worlds as rich as these, focusing character studies’ intricacies might have spun gold from raw ore. As it stands, Here After teases depths while preferring surface frights, obscuring the light its subjects deserve to share.
The Fear Factor
Here After floats by on atmosphere more than actual scares. Beyond Robin’s uncanny shift, few sequences unsettle. Buildings cast long shadows and faces flash briefly in windows, but these flourishes fail to sustain suspense.
Lurking terrors receive minimal setup; robbing reveals impact. Twists surface abruptly instead of twisting knots pulled tighter across the film. We grasp foreshadowed directions long before characters.
What power lies here goes unproved. Does Robin harbor a vengeful spirit? Does Claire unravel or near-death encounters warp minds? Tantalizing prospects go nowhere. A story this dark deserves deeper, scary dives.
With nuanced characters to care for and unanswered questions that creep, Here After could burrow under skin. Yet scenes scratch surfaces and move on. Its unexplained world begs exploration, but threats stay ill-defined despite a platform to explore psychologies’ gray areas and religion’s mysteries in the gloom. Potential for creeping, thought-provoking scares goes hauntingly untapped.
Facing Further Flaws
Beneath hopes of depth lay pitfalls. Here After can’t escape. From the start, viewers feel tread of stale storyline, soulless types, and sluggish drift.
A formula fears reinvention, relying instead on well-worn tropes. Mystery motivates little examination, resolved by rote revelations lacking surprise. Underbaked characters elicit detached observation, not fervor in fates.
Story and character, core supports, prove woefully frail. Viewers endure languid scenes awaiting a payoff not worth the bleak journey. The finale’s glimpse inside Claire gives too little for too long away. A twist satisfies the plot but not as drama or chills.
Salvation arrived too late, when momentum and interest lagged far behind. More care shaping strangers at its heart, imbuing pace with vivacity, could have turned potential into treasure. But ambition fell short, and viewers feel scarce returns on their investment of time. Final beauty brightens a dim whole instead of a consistent light guiding along darkened paths. Ultimately, Here After leaves the audience cold where it wished they moved.
Finding Further Potential
Here After flashes glimmers of insight, most evident in its thoughtful conclusion. There, director Salerno’s skill whispers of unrealized potential throughout a plodding picture.
Despite solid efforts from Britton and company, listless characters and an uninventive script drain force from supernatural mysteries deserving richer exploration. A few arresting images alone can’t redeem slack storytelling wearing thin its weighty subject of grief.
This film brushes death’s meaning without embrace, preferring rote shocks to resonant souls. With defter handling of its heady themes and people living them, Here After may have burrowed deeper under viewers’ skins. Instead, it offers little to linger in memory, its vision of afterlives as blurred and fleeting as spirits within. With tighter focus on intimate terrains over trodden paths, this director’s talent could yield hauntings that last far longer.
The Review
Here After
Despite flashes of promise in its climax, Here After proves an overall disappointment, failing to develop characters, sustain tension, or do justice to its exploration of weighty themes around loss and the afterlife.
PROS
- Beautifully shot and emotionally impactful finale scene
- Strong central performance from Connie Britton
CONS
- Thin, two-dimensional characters
- Relies too heavily on horror cliches and lacks memorable scares
- Unsatisfying and confusing plot developments
- Slow, dull pace for most of the runtime
- Fails to earn its revelatory third act twist
