Mark Reviews Movies: THE AFTERMATH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2019

Some might be too hasty in dismissing melodrama as some sort of lesser dramatic form. Sometimes, it's quite effective as a shortcut, especially when a story has so much or something esoteric to say on a certain subject. We don't need to know about the motivations, the inner lives, or the contradictory nature of characters in such material. We just need some entryway into it—recognizable people, an easy-to-understand scenario, a straightforward plot. It feels like melodrama because it is, but its purpose is to achieve a higher goal.

The Aftermath seems to be moving in that vein, with its story about Hamburg after World War II, where British soldiers are overseeing the clean-up and reconstruction of the city after Allied forces, as one character puts it, "dropped more bombs on the city in a weekend than we did for the whole of the war." There are people holding up pictures of loved ones on the sidewalk, desperate to know if they should maintain hope for the person's discovery or accept the inevitability of the recovery of that person's body. German citizens are moving pieces of rubble and finding the burnt-beyond-recognition corpses of their neighbors.

There's mourning, yes, and there's also fear and underlying hatred. The British were prepared for the horrors of what they'd be seeing. They had, after all, just gone through a world war, and in the five months since the end of European side of the conflict, Nazi atrocities have come to light. In this movie, at least, the British weren't quite prepared for how the local population would behave in the face of total, destructive defeat.

If the German citizenry fears and hates the foreign soldiers currently occupying their city, the British soldiers in Hamburg distrust the men, the women, and even the children who live there. Whatever houses remain—mostly the fancier ones on the outskirts of the city—have a distinct, portrait-sized stain on the wall of one of the main rooms. The soldiers don't know for certain if the occupants had a portrait of the Nazi leader hung there out of necessity in an authoritarian state or out of genuine love. In the eyes of certain soldiers, every German man, woman, and child is simply a Nazi in hiding, waiting for the opportunity to strike.

So much is happening in the backdrop of this story, based on Rhidian Brook's novel, yet the movie, written by the author with Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, never quite connects that political intrigue and mutual antagonism with the tale at its core. We keep waiting, in other words, for the other shoe to drop, in terms of how a love triangle—between a British colonel, his wife, and the German man whose house the Brits have taken over to live in during the reconstruction effort—ties into the complexity of post-war Hamburg.

Something does happen, making a connection between the story's version of the first neo-Nazis and the house's occupants, but it's played out so hastily and resolved so easily that it just seems like an obstacle to the movie's intentions. Those intentions, ultimately, are entirely about melodrama.

The colonel is Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke, not bothering to do a British dialect), and his wife is Rachel (Keira Knightley). They had a son who died during the German bombings of London, and as a result, there's silent bitterness between the two.

The house is owned by Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), a former architect who helped build facilities for the Nazis but disagreed with their politics and never joined the party. His wife was killed during the bombings, leaving him a single father to his daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann), who quietly resents the Brits in her home. Lewis trusts Stephen, and Rachel doesn't.

Obviously, she will grow to trust him, and an affair will spontaneously erupt just at the turning point of their difficult relationship. The movie gets some mileage from Knightley and Skarsgård' performances, who make that moment into one of passion that has little to do with sexual attraction—and a lot to do with the need to calm the shared anger and grief they're feeling. While Lewis is off investigating a series of attacks on British soldiers by an underground group of stubborn Nazis, Rachel, Stephen, and Freda form a makeshift family that will have to do for the time, since they have nothing else left.

Those scenes are the movie's best, since they're all about the desire and, indeed, the need for stability in a world that hasn't offered any in some time. Still, they don't gel with the chaos in the background or, for that matter, the way that the plot ultimately turns. It's a story about grief, of course, and how it can affect an individual and an entire society. It is strange, though, that, with all of this grieving and anger and hatred, The Aftermath only finds closure in the case of an emotionally constipated man finally saying what he's feeling. That makes the movie a lot of build-up for a fairly inconsequential payoff.

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