Rent After Midnight (2019)

A strange creature thriller that's actually a relationship drama - After Midnight review by BG

Probably mis-marketed, 'After Midnight' is likely to irritate a lot of people. It suggests you're in for a suspense-filled exploration of why a mysterious creature is besieging a lone man in his house, and instead delivers a slow-paced slacker-esque relationship drama with occasional creature weirdness.

The vast majority of the plot is based around Hank (Jeremy Gardner) and shows a broad spread of his relationship with Abby (Brea Grant). Hank's a local hunter and likeable, but very much rooted to the area. Abby's seen glimpses of the wider world and is desperate for a better look outside their town, but stays because she and Hank have a strong (and quite cutesy) relationship.

Things go sideways all at once, when Hank wakes up to find her gone and nothing but an uninformative note to explain her continuing and lengthy disappearance.

Slowly the couple's friends and Abby's cop brother (Justin Benson) begin to question Hank's grip on reality and sobriety as he starts drinking harder, shooting at ill-advised targets, and complaining about a mysterious beast scratching to get into his house...

This is not the movie for you if you're looking for a 'creature thriller'. Although there are startling moments, they're very few and far between. For every minute that the creature plays a part in the script, there are 20 filed with relationship flashbacks, amusing drunken conversations, or scenes of Hank acting frustrated.

The script is very freewheeling, and seeing Benson and Moorhead's name as producers helped it make sense to me, as it feels tonally a little similar to their movie 'The Endless' (although not as polished) where scenes of gentle mystery and confusion give way to occasional bursts of brief amusing character silliness, and then something creepy.

By the time the ending nears, you'll have either jacked it in, or be decently invested in Hank and Abby's relationship, and finding out what's going on with them - to the point that you almost forget about the creature side of things.

There are special effects, and they're pretty good, but this film is all about the characters. If you think they're a little charming and kind-of-amusing in the first ten minutes, I'd stick with it - you might be pleasantly surprised with what you get, as it's definitely inventive. If they just annoy you, ditch it - the monster element isn't major enough to make up for it.

Not what you might expect. - After Midnight review by NP

Whatever you were expecting from this film, you probably weren’t expecting what you got. One thing it did for me was confounded my expectations, threatened to bore me, charmed me, and at the end, shocked me into thinking – what?

But that’s good, I suppose, because I imagine all those reactions were what the filmmakers intended. Billed as horror but basically a character study between a man and his partner - he’s a hunter, in love with his life and his house; she’s glimpsed a world beyond that and wants to explore.

The acting is naturalistic and all the characters are very appealing. For a while, I feared that Brea Grant’s role as Abby was simply to look pretty and react to director/writer/actor Jeremy Gardner as Hank. At the mid-point, however, things changed in her favour – and not before time.

The moments of shock are exactly that. We’ve virtually forgotten about the monstrous element by the time it shows up; and yet the moment that stuck most in my memory afterwards is the karaoke scene, which could have been saccharine-sweet, but succeeded in provoking genuine emotion. My score is 7 out of 10.