After­math

What hap­pens when an inno­cent mis­take has dev­as­tat­ing results? How can you nur­ture for­give­ness? When is it right to take jus­tice into your own hands? After­math, direct­ed by Elliott Lester, fol­lows one man’s strug­gle with tragedy, and tries to explore this fer­tile ter­rain of grief and redemp­tion. It fails spectacularly.

The film opens with Roman (Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger) eager­ly await­ing the return of his wife and preg­nant daugh­ter on a flight from Kiev. He hangs bunting and spruces him­self up in antic­i­pa­tion of their return. A shot of Schwarzenegger’s butt peep­ing out from behind a show­er cur­tain pro­vides the film’s sole, gris­ly thrill. Mean­while, air traf­fic con­troller Jake (Scoot McNairy) is left alone mid-shift, and over­sees a fatal mix-up.

The emo­tion­al tone is wonky from the start. At the air­port, Roman pass­es anoth­er grief-strick­en man and fix­es him with a squint intend­ed to be steely and pre­scient, but ends up mak­ing him look like a beef­cake Lar­ry David. Ignor­ing the prof­fered coun­selling ses­sions, he goes on his own solo mis­sion to get an apol­o­gy for the acci­dent, his brow now fixed in a per­plexed furrow.

Aftermath’s many face-palm­ing moments com­ple­ment Schwarzenegger’s unique act­ing style – he has a strange­ly child­like screen pres­ence, despite his hulk­ing, weath­er-beat­en frame. It doesn’t help that he’s only ever giv­en clich­es to express his grief: booze is downed from brown paper bags; pin boards are cov­ered with news clip­pings in dim­ly-lit rooms; graves are slept on.

The film­mak­ing-by-num­bers con­tin­ues through the hol­low dénoue­ment and a not-so-shock­ing twist. It attempts to spell out a sim­ple moral mes­sage – apol­o­gis­ing is good – in huge let­ters, but even gets that con­fused. Iron­i­cal­ly, con­sid­er­ing Schwarzenegger’s high-pro­file beef with the incum­bent US Pres­i­dent, the film’s real mes­sage seems to be dis­tinct­ly Trumpian. It sug­gests that the ordi­nary man must bypass the oppres­sive struc­tures of bureau­cra­cy to mete out what he feels in his heart to be true jus­tice. If this involves extreme vio­lence, so be it.

Schwarzenegger’s char­ac­ter is based on a very moral­ly dubi­ous, real-life Russ­ian vig­i­lante killer Vitaly Kaloyev, yet the actor is bizarrely framed as a blue-col­lar every­man with a heart of gold. Kaloyev is sim­i­lar­ly treat­ed as a folk hero by the creepy pro-Putin youth move­ment group Nashi, and is now a min­is­ter in the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment despite being a con­vict­ed mur­der­er. Con­sid­er­ing America’s cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate, this gives Aftermath’s silli­ness a decid­ed­ly sin­is­ter edge.