AFTER ALL - Mark Reviews Movies

After All, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 16, 2025

The air is so thick with misfortune in After All that the characters can hardly breathe, let alone talk about anything and everything that matters. The best moments of Jack Bryant's screenplay are the ones where its main characters—a grandmother, a mother, and a teenager—do actually communicate with each other in some way. It feels as if one could count those scenes, though, on the fingers of a single hand.

Instead, most of this comes down to a series of flashbacks, jumping from the present back to the childhood of Ellen Sharpe (Erika Christensen) and to the early years of marriage and motherhood for Ellen's mother Verna (Penelope Ann Miller). Ellen's teenage daughter Haley (Kiara Huhammad) gets left behind in the flashback department, except to show why Verna started raising the girl when she was a baby. One supposes, as unlikely as it might seem, Verna's house and marriage to an abusive man with schizophrenia settled down after the baby arrived and before the husband died by suicide.

Even if that is somehow the entire truth, Haley surely has something going on in her own life that deserves examination, beyond the fact that she's a bundle of nervousness and self-doubt as a teen. That's nothing unique about being a teenager, though, and apparently, whatever in her own past has led to the girl's current state of mind isn't nearly as interesting as Ellen and Verna's stories.

We meet these three characters in a brief prologue, showing how Ellen is perpetually irresponsible, while Verna and Haley have set up a nice enough home and routine for the two of them, apart from a couple of classmates regularly mocking the teen for her weight, living with her grandmother, and her mother's absence. One imagines that last observation is a particularly sore subject for Haley, but Bryant leaves most of that for us to assume and deduce when Ellen inevitably comes back into her daughter's life.

That comes after Verna has a stroke. As a result, she has suffered the kind of brain damage that is very convenient for drama. At times, she cannot remember her family members, is confused about time, believes dead people are still alive, and mistakes a person for someone else. At other times, she healthy, vibrant, and perfectly cognizant of her surroundings, other people, her life, and the lessons she wants to ensure that Haley and Ellen, who decides to live with her mother and daughter for the time being, will learn by the end of the story.

Most of that last part comes near the end of the movie, of course, and the rest of it revolves around the three being uncomfortable with someone else—the two daughters, mainly, with their respective mothers—and the two mothers being confronted with assorted, troubling memories. When Ellen returns to her childhood home, she wanders through the house and is met with some flash of trauma upon entering each and every room. Some people reflexively argue that it's better for a movie to show the audience information instead of simply telling it to them, and that sequence is a good example of why that little aphorism about filmmaking isn't exactly accurate. Director Kerstin Karlhuber definitely puts images of important information on screen, but they don't really tell us much at all about these characters in the process.

The central issue here, perhaps, is that the most vital parts of this story, as it turns out, all exist in the past. There's especially the influence of Walter (David James Elliott), Verna's husband and Ellen's father, whom a younger Verna (played by Nicole Elliott) meets, marries, has a few children with, and fears because of his seemingly random outbursts of anger and violence. As a kid, a young Ellen (played by Harper Navarre) primarily recalls that darker side of her father, insulting her and her older brother Lenny (Austin P. McKenzie), yelling at the dinner table, and beating his son with his belt when the teen boy dares to stand up for himself.

For as much as the movie broadly shows us about these pasts, there are significant gaps in the flashback narrative, mostly because the movie wants to use those scenes in the present to reveal a few details or secrets. That brings us back to the old and empty saying about how movies should show and not tell, because here are scenes of dialogue that, yes, are in part about characters speaking information.

They are also, however, the only times that these characters actually get a bit deeper about that information on a level that makes them, well, characters. One features a heart-to-heart between Ellen and Haley about why she left home and, later, would leave her daughter with Verna. Another has Verna telling Ellen that the two women share more pain than the daughter previously knew. Watching those scenes and these performances in them, it's as if a different story suddenly emerges—one in which the past defines both these characters and how they might move forward together.

Ultimately, After All isn't exactly interested in that, because it's more about its events than its characters. The movie is finely performed melodrama with flashes of the character-based drama it might have been instead.

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