After Love: In The Shade Film Festival Review

After Love: Film Review

Cast: Joanna Scanlan, Nathalie Richard, Talid Ariss, Nasser Memarzia
Director: Aleem Khan

What could so easily have been an overplayed, overly dramatic piece of cinema emerges as one of the most subtly devastating and impressively-led movies of the time.

Joanna Scanlan is Mary, happily married to Pakistani sweetheart Ahmed in Dover in England, a short hop from France. As the film opens, the pair are back from a Muslim event, and settling into the mundanities of a night in. But tragedy awaits as Ahmed innocently passes away in a chair.

Thrust into a world of grief, Mary's world is further rocked by the revelation that Ahmed had another family in France. So Mary sets across the water, to try and fathom what remains now of her world...

Through a film of dignity, a film which doesn't seek to condemn or vilify, and a film immensely helmed by its lead actor, After Love presents a quietly powerful portrait of what comes after. 

It may have some narrative contrivances that push Mary and the other woman Genevieve together, but what Aleem Khan's full length debut doesn't do is milk them for all their worth. It helps greatly that Joanna Scanlan is an utterly commanding lead performer, etching every interaction with both heartache and sincerity.

A sequence where Scanlan strips in front of a mirror, examining every flap and fold of excess skin after discovering a picture of the other woman is stark in its execution, but powerful in its discourse. Scanlan says nothing throughout, the camera lingering in parts and seeing her as she now sees herself. But Scanlan utters nary a word in this scene, and delivers more in those few minutes than reams of exposition could entail - years of betrayal, moments of now unwanted self-examination and jealousies all bubble to the surface in just a few seconds of screentime.

After Love is a subtle story, poignantly and powerfully told where the mundane meets the utterly unthinkable and with a careful lensing from Khan, it's a provocatively understated story that stays with you long after the lights have gone up.