After Hours

Superbly farcical satire/ Kafkaesque comedy of errors about a New York night that just doesn't end. Griffin Dunne plays the hapless Paul Hackett whose mundane life leads him to step out of his comfort zone and then spend the rest of his evening regretting that decision. What's brilliant is that After Hours keeps dragging Paul into different movies that he wants no part of. He's a mostly passive protagonist, constantly trying to extricate himself from the increasingly fraught storylines unfurling around him and just go home. But anything that can go wrong does go wrong, and he's pulled right back in again. There are at least a dozen other movies that Paul tries to sidestep with varying success, until you feel like the entire city is alive with characters and plots weaving a tapestry-like conspiracy against a single reluctant man. While it's a stretch to imagine all of this happening to one person at all, let alone across the span of a single evening, Scorsese and writer Joseph Minion take events to the extreme to perfectly capture that claustrophobic anxiety of things going wrong when all you want to do is just get home. Paul isn't perfect - he's a bit of a narcissist and a coward for starters - and he certainly makes questionable decisions throughout the night that make things worse for himself. But there's a relatability to his growing desperation, his stubborn refusal to succumb to the surreal. It's mostly a comedy, but punctuated with darkness. A suicide, a murder, violent crime, vigilante justice, tales of sexual assault, drug abuse, and all manner of other things that make up a normal night in a city like New York. I can't say I've ever had a night like Paul has, but I've definitely been alone in the city in the early hours of the morning, and it's a different world. Even if it's your home that you know like the back of your hand, it becomes an alien planet after 3am. Or, as the marvellous Dick Miller says in a surprising cameo: "Different rules apply when it get's this late. You know what I mean? It's like after hours."