Aftermath (2017)

Aftermath arrives with the grim determination of a film that has read the room and decided the room wants to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger suffer quietly in a cardigan. Elliott Lester's drama, drawn from the 2002 Überlingen mid-air collision, follows a construction worker who loses his wife and pregnant daughter to a crash, and the air traffic controller whose single shift error caused it. Both men unravel. One drinks. The other buys a new identity and takes a job at a travel agency, which is its own kind of punishment.

The film is somber, well-acted in places, and utterly uninterested in the cultural conversations of its moment. The cast is white, the grief is personal, and the women exist to be mourned or to hand over documents through a mail slot. There is a journalist, a wife, and an airline representative, and none of them gets a thesis. The closest the film comes to a systemic argument is a scene in which corporate lawyers slide a settlement offer across a table and decline to apologize, which registers as a mild jab at institutional coldness and nothing more. No one eats any rich people. No one mentions the planet.

The final act reaches for a moral about forgiveness, delivered through a knife, a prison term, and a young man who cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. It is a moral stated plainly instead of shouted, and the film trusts the drama to carry it. What remains is a modest, melancholy revenge picture that believes in grief, guilt, and the long tail of both. It preaches nothing, represents no one by design, and seems content to let two men sit in a room and fall apart. There are worse ways to spend a runtime. There are also more instructive ones.