'After the Dark' -- Somewhat Less Than Revelatory

Overall: 3.3/4
          Acting: 4/4
          Cinematography: 4/4
          Production Design: 4/4
          Costume/Makeup: 4/4
          Tech: 3/4
          Music/Score: 3/4
          Pacing: 3/4
          Script: 2/4

Warning for: heavy spoilers, discussions of heterosexism, ableism, and imbalanced sexual power dynamics, along with some heavy philosophical rambling.

After the Dark -- titled The Philosophers literally everywhere but in America -- has a very simple premise: Twenty high school seniors in Jakarta have one last Philosophy class before their graduation, and their teacher drags them through a few final thought experiments to see what they've learned.

The teacher, played by James D'Arcy, is unsympathetic from the very beginning, and remains so throughout.  He tries to make the students play by the strict rules of logic that make the most sense to him.  This, however, is at odds with his own emotional and sexual attachment to the protagonist the blonde and beautiful A+ student Petra.  He's jealous of her relationship with her boyfriend and classmate, James (Rhys Wakefield), and rigs the thought experiment to hurt them both.  The performance is impressive but the character is distasteful as all hell.

Petra, however, is triumphant.  By the climax of the movie, she has taken a leadership position in the group and not only played by the rules of the thought experiment, she has flouted all the logical precepts so dear to Mr. Zimit.  She chooses not based on practicality, but on who will make the thought experiment's year in a bunker scenario the least painful.  She rejects cold logic in favor of warmth and an acceptance that death will and must come for everyone, and implicitly decides that she does not need to continue the human race -- she is under no obligation to do so.  Her only responsibility is to those around her right then and there, and how she can make their world and their existence better for the foreseeable future.

It's an unfamiliar kind of conclusion, this acceptance of both one's own mortality and of the end of humanity, but it's as valid as any other way of beating the thought experiment.

Unfortunately, instead of ending the film with the end of the final thought experiment, the movie continues on for this final half hour where another character talks about the thought experiment he ran within the thought experiment in order to sleep with every single woman who didn't get into Petra's bunker.  It's somewhat demeaning and thoroughly unnecessary for both the plot and any of the relevant themes of the movie, and I just didn't like it.  I also didn't like the subsequent scene, where Petra breaks off what was apparently a long-running affair between her and her teacher -- it just seemed wrong to me that she'd been written as this confident, morally-correct, fantastically intelligent character, only for her to be cheating on her boyfriend with this teacher in whom I can find literally no redeeming characteristics.

Also a problem is the ableist representation of autism spectrum disorders -- when one of the characters is said by the thought experiment to have an ASD, he is immediately excluded from the bunker in the second round of the experiment.  Petra insists on having him in her bunker in the third, but her reasoning is that for some, autism could be considered a gift, and I'm not sure that that's all that much better.  Nevertheless, I have not read any reviews so far of the film by any autistic people, so please take my opinions with a grain of salt.

Finally, it troubles me that the film makes the assumption that the two statistically present LGBTQ people in a group of 20 would both be cis men.  Who would then proceed to get together.  While positive gay representation, particularly of an interracial relationship, is wonderful, I can't help but wish that there had been even the vaguest nod to the fact that (a) bisexuals exist and are a thing, and (b) LGBTQ women also exist and are a thing.

Overall, I give this movie a 3.3/4, because it's absolutely gorgeous in all its technical work and cinematography, and everyone is on top of their game.  It just goes on for a solid 20 minutes longer than it needs to, which is a damn shame.  It had potential to be one of the most cerebral and thought-provoking films of the year, and I enjoyed it a lot...up until that last section.