The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

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Combining various genres in one feature can yield a captivating outcome, yet After Midnight offers a mix that will leave you scratching your head.

After Midnight follows Hank (Jeremy Gardner), who wakes up one day to find a note from his girlfriend of 10 years, Abby (Brea Grant), saying that she had to go away for a while and that she loves him. After Abby has been gone for weeks without even a call, Hank starts to think she may have left him for good. But he is also occupied with a monster that claws at his door every night trying to get in. No one believes Hank about the monster, assuming it’s an emotional reaction to Abby’s disappearance, but what if they are wrong?

The plot seems like a hybrid of a romantic movie and a thriller; starting with the happy love story between Hank and Abby, with flashbacks that intertwine with the miserable present that Hank is living in, while offering various horrific scenarios of what may have happened to Abby. Most of the theories are too thin to be plausible, so even if they were what the movie went for, audiences are left unconvinced.

The problem with the plot is that a security camera outside Hank’s house would have cleared the whole thing up. The film does poke at that as Hank tries to take a picture of the monster, upon suggestions from disbelievers, but all the images are hazy and unclear. The natural progression would be to get a security camera, especially if you are trying to prove to people that you are not crazy, but that would have taken the supposedly gripping mystery out of the film.

For the acting, both Jeremy Gardner and Brea Grant gave mediocre performances that needed so much more to stand out, at least to lift the implausible plot that the film is trying to pass off. Grant did give a slightly better performance with more expressive reactions and body language, but it was still nothing above mediocre.

You can go to see After Midnight out of sheer curiosity, but it is safe to say that you would not want to see it again.