Vague Visages’ After review contains minor spoilers. Anthony Lapia’s 2023 movie stars Louise Chevillotte, Majd Mastoura and Natalia Wiszniewska. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Anthony Lapia’s stark, confident debut feature After is about inhibition in nighttime spaces, the singular moments that bind strangers together and the endless possibilities found in the collective experience of clubbing. 

After’s plot is simple: on a night in Paris — in which the Yellow Vests Protests are going strong — a disparate group of clubbers dance, consume drugs and ignore the world outside. In a smoking area, Félicie (Louise Chevillotte) meets Saïd (Majd Mastoura), an Uber driver. As their conversation turns from banal into something more interesting, they leave the club for the relative calm of Félicie’s nearby apartment while the party continues into the night. 

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After’s appeal isn’t in its narrative complexity. Instead, the film’s strengths lie in the perfect capturing of the rhythms and atmosphere of a night out — one that bursts with energy, with competing conversations — and the gradual transition into the hinterland of dawn, between the dual selves that exist in night and day.

Lapia and cinematographers Robin Fresson and Raimon Gaffier use jolting, swirling lights to illuminate club scenes. Conversations happen through gestures and movements — two strangers kiss passionately, their bodies bathed in shadow and light that only increases After’s sense of constant, unrestrained movement. The use of close-ups prevent a full understanding of the club’s space, and the only things that matter are beads of sweat disappearing down the neck of a shirt, heads thrown back in ecstasy and drug-induced euphoria glimpsed as the camera moves seamlessly between the crowd.

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After’s soundtrack dominates the first half of the film, whether it’s music playing in the next room while clubbers relax outside or while dancers move to the ever-present sounds that overwhelm any dialogue that could take place. When Lapia cuts to Félicie’s flat, the sudden absence of sound is as intense as its earlier presence, and the film easily shifts between the dynamism of the club and the sparse, harshly lit apartment where normality slowly begins to creep in.