After

Jenny Gage’s After comes out of a One Direction fan fiction that Anna Todd typed on her phone and posted to Wattpad, close to a chapter a day. In the original the male lead simply was Harry Styles; for publication he was renamed Hardin Scott and the story otherwise stayed put. That origin explains more than any plot summary, because Hardin is built as a recognisable fantasy object rather than a person, which is why the script never justifies a single thing he does. The adaptation is markedly tamer than the book. What was explicit on the page has been sanded into something sellable to a younger audience, so readers arriving from the novel find the heat gone while newcomers are left wondering why the relationship is presented as so consuming. The screenplay passed through Susan McMartin and then Tamara Chestna, with Gage handling final revisions. Made for fourteen million dollars, it took roughly seventy million worldwide, and shooting happened largely at Emory University in Atlanta. A good fit if you are curious how a piece of fan fiction gets sanded down on its way to a cinema release, and you want to watch the seams. Not a fit if you need a film to notice, even once, that its romantic lead is controlling rather than intense.