Wednesday, August 4, 2021

(2021) Aftermath - Mediocre Horror TV Movie with Predictable Story

There was this new movie released on Netflix yesterday which seemed like a rather standard premise of house being hunted. As I was just looking for something new after watching new season of another series, I decided to give this a try. Well let's find out more on this, shall we?

Brief Story Line

Natalie (Ashley Greene - The Twilight Saga movies etc) and her husband Kevin (Shawn Ashmore - X-Men trilogy etc) were having strained relationship and decided to move to a new house they got really cheap due to some prior incident. As they struggled with adjusting their lives with this house, Natalie started to be disturbed by strange occurrences, including their dog's acting weird.

Things got more complicated when there seemed to be intruder sneaking to the house, but the detective Richardson (Sharif Atkins - White Collar TV series etc) could not find evidence. As situation was getting worse, Natalie and Kevin started to grew further apart but they had to disregard their difference and save themselves. So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this drama horror movie.

End of Brief Story Line

This kind of story has been told so many times before. And I said above, I just gave it a try for variety of movie experience (plus a matter of convenience). As I watched this movie, the first feeling I got was a sense of familiarity, where a couple moved to a new house with a history that would never made it an option in the first place. But I kind of like the idea of how simple it was to justify the reason for moving and it seemed so natural.

As usual, the movie was going in a not so fast pace, although this one did have quite a number of support cast which I usually would not find in this sort of story. There were the characters of Natalie's sister Dani (Brit Baron - Glow TV series etc), acquaintance Nick Scott (Ross McCall - Band of Brothers TV series etc), Kevin's college student partner Avery (Diana Hopper - Goliath TV series) and Natalie's mother Farrah (Susan Walters - The Vampire Diaries TV series etc). They actually made the story a bit more colorful and not too focused on the main couple.

For a movie that has duration of 114 minutes including closing credit, this one did not feel too long. Probably as I said because they have a lot of characters involved. In fact the many characters also made the movie felt like having more than one main story. It actually depend on the taste of the audience. Some prefer to focus on the house so the creepiness would be felt, but others like having more characters as well. For me, I did not have any particular preference and just focused on watching the story unfold.

What I can tell you though, personally the side story was a bit distracting, because I already knew they were distractions. So there was no shocking revelations at all. In fact, I think the story was quite predictable. There was no real eerie or scary feeling like what you would feel in this sort of movie. The story started to become more interesting after playing > 70 minutes, and really picked up in the last 15 minutes or so. Hence, this movie did not really leave me the best of impression at all since the interesting part was just too short. There was one or two nice enough moment in the middle, but they were also too brief.

The cast themselves were pretty decent. The main cast especially, tried to do their jobs in the best way possible. I did not really recognize Ashley Greene, although Shawn Ashmore was a really familiar face to me (saw him in prior movies/series, plus he's got almost identical look with his twin brother Aaron Ashmore). Oh btw, this really felt like a TV movie, so as long as you do not expect something extraordinary, you should be fine watching this one. Overall, It was one of those films that was not too impressive for me and would likely just pass by with very vague memory of it after few weeks time.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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