After...

Introduction

After... is clearly a film made with a small budget and with a small team, led by writer/director/producer David L. Cunningham. It begins with a series of intertitles telling us that:
Urban Explorers are extreme sports' answer to computer hackers: a growing breed of thrill-seekers who thrive on infiltrating the planet's most dangerous man-made structures... Just because they can.

Three of these urban explorers are husband and wife Nate and Adrian and her brother Jay who seems to organise and publicise their exploits on his website. Following a trip to Detroit where they travel down a tunnel in bodybags before climbing up to the roof in order to base-jump off, the three head to Moscow in order to investigate Stalin's Metro-2 underground system and Ivan The Terrible's torture chambers - should they exist.

From the Moscow subway system they jump onto the tracks and work their way along to an entrance to the subsystem, dodging trains as they go and, from there, down into the unknown. Nate and Adrian are grieving over the death of their three year old daughter and it's not long before Nate begins having flashbacks and hallucinating - but are the things he sees real or imaginary and exactly what have they got themselves into?

Video

The film is a mix of first person shot video as the characters are all carrying cameras and a more objective eye, all cut together with incredible speed and some lack of clarity. Whilst I was watching it I began to wonder whether my eyes were tired, making the images blurry but this was not the case as much of the film is out of focus (intentionally so) and shot with strange light filters so you don't know the veracity of what you are watching.

Audio

The soundtrack is quite effective with clear dialogue and a good soundstage presented by the surrounds. When the characters are enclosed, the sound transmits the feeling well and is generally quite atmospheric.

Extra Features

This is a film that leaves much to the imagination and I would like to hear from David L. Cunningham about the roots of the project and what his interpretation is, so what do we get? A trailer - that's it!

Conclusion

After... is brief, clocking in at only 76 minutes including end credits, so there is no time to develop the characters fully or expand on Nate's paternal guilt/grief that was so key to Don't Look Now or, more recently, The Descent. Neil Marshall's film is similarly themed but executed so much better, with more tension and shocks. I never got the feeling that Cunningham knew exactly where this film was going - is it a near-death dream like Jacob's Ladder or a descent into the secrets of the Russian state? By the end I didn't know and, to be honest, didn't care.

It is a reasonably enjoyable film but one that takes 70 minutes to go nowhere and is largely forgettable. The premise is more interesting than the final product, which is a shame as After... could've been so much better.