After Hours

An incredibly strange film, extremely peculiar and, above all, deeply Kafkaesque. It may be the film I’ve seen that best manages to exist between realism and surrealism. Every character is strange, peculiar, mysterious, yet in the end none of them ever feels truly unrealistic: they’re all the kind of people who, individually, wouldn’t surprise you if you met them during a night in the most eccentric neighbourhood of a big city. But the way coincidence and chance keep making them enter and re-enter the protagonist’s life in this chaotic yet somehow balanced manner keeps you constantly invested in his story. The protagonist himself is a peculiar character: an ordinary man, perhaps slightly sharper than average, who reacts to adversity the way the viewer probably would, even if, most of the time, he finds himself forced to act in a certain way. It’s a film with a very distinct stylistic identity; from the shot transitions to the images of New York immersed in darkness, everything draws you in and helps convey Paul’s growing sense of claustrophobia and panic.