After Midnight
When he isn’t giving everything the side eye like it’s in his hunting sights or fantasizing about his girlfriend Abby (Brea Grant), who fills his memories as sunny and loving and funny all of which only makes it worse that she’s left him, disappeared from their shared family home after a decade together with nothing but a note there’s a monster that comes for Hank (Jeremy Gardner)’s house every night, forcing him to sleep by the door with a shotgun; but that fear is not as deep as the hurt of her getting up and going away.
For half its running time “After Midnight,” written by Gardner (who co-directs with Christian Stella), is in this state, or channels it anyway and can feel it. There are some long winded non sequiturs from his dim-bulb friend Wade (Henry Zebrowski), who drinks off the mat at Hank’s bar, and an appearance by Justin Benson as a dusty cop and Abby’s brother; the timing is padded out with these.
The movie doesn’t get into the metaphor so much as just keeps showing us images of Abby, next to Hank’s grungy shield; it almost seems stuck there on purpose. Like Gardner should know that even if he does look beaten down, like whenever the monster pops up, “After Midnight” itself looks limited, feels small. It risks losing you, at its worst: with Hank wallowing shallowly with aimless bangs of the monster in between sulking thoughts about himself onscreen through most of those ninety minutes.
But this isn’t all we see of Abby I will tell you this so you don’t give up on it too soon: She reappears halfway through out of nowhere, more or less; shortly thereafter they clear things up about her leaving. They wait for the monster in this scene for thirteen minutes they’re sitting in the doorway on her thirty-fourth birthday eve. It’s a well written sit and talk between two people who have grown past needing to hear their own truths out loud, the microaggressions he thinks he can justly hold over her and the melancholic clarifications she retorts about her own wants with her big picture in life, ideas he has previously overlooked.
He still can’t meet her eyes when she starts in on him with talk of future seriousness’s, maybe living somewhere other than here in the middle of now here’s. This centerpiece paints the clearest picture of what has been happening in their ten years together because it’s the whole movie without any monster; it’s just these two guys acting their asses off, and a camera that very slowly pushes into them the gentlest but most forceful thing movies have for getting us to look at something like really good theater.
This is the first passage where I cared deeply for “After Midnight” and made everything before it feel slightly less like necessary setup than unsuspecting anticipation. This was the reality check behind all those rosy flashbacks Hank had. This was the long hard look behind all those editing tricks Gardner and Stella used to jar Hank from his daydreams while banking half their movie on a monster waiting game. The movie grows up here, and does so through this scene, which only skilled storytellers could do; but then what happens after must be even more heightened by how smart it is leading up to it all this next part is obvious.
But Abby had this feeling that she remained that they all still regarded her as more of a subject for Hank’s gaze or the object of her own simplified one. Played by Grant, who demonstrates here (and in her script for “12 Hour Shift,” and the forthcoming “Lucky”) an expansive dramatic imagination, she ought to be a three dimensional character. Rather than simply being the gone girlfriend, though, Abby turns out to be the girlfriend who can rouse a man child from his immobility; which is itself another too neat way of narrating some complex beast within someone like Hank.
Yet what we have here is a monster movie with a nifty bait and switch, whose heart bleeds slowly like “Blue Valentine.” If it doesn’t hit you in your emotions or look like any of those conversations at previous crossroads you’ve had with a long time partner well, at least it swings big. And does so with some late scenes that are punchy and genuinely jolting in their rightness. The back and forth between two hander and monster movie that “After Midnight” manages deserves both Valentine’s Day weekend consideration and maybe even a scary conversation afterward.
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