The Aftermath (2019)

The Aftermath arrives in the ruins of Hamburg in 1945 and promptly sets about the only business it knows: a love triangle in a requisitioned house. Keira Knightley plays Rachael Morgan, a British colonel's wife who despises the Germans until she does not, and Alexander Skarsgard plays the widowed architect whose attic she would prefer he vacated. Snow falls. Pianos are played. Adulteries are committed with the solemnity of a treaty signing. It is the sort of film in which everyone suffers beautifully and no one says anything that could be mistaken for a thesis.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is blank. The cast is uniformly white, a choice the historical setting permits and the film never troubles to interrogate. There are no queer characters, no racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no critique of the moneyed class that requisitions other people's houses. The female lead carries the narrative, but her journey concerns grief and infidelity, not liberation. History serves as backdrop rather than argument, so nothing is revised, and the film resists the urge to sermonize, which is either restraint or a failure of nerve, depending on the mood of the room.

A tasteful, glum romance that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for snow and sorrow. It is based on a novel, it won nothing, it topped no chart, and it will be remembered, if at all, as the last Fox Searchlight release before a corporate merger swallowed the studio. A perfectly pleasant evening that leaves no residue. The classification is complete, and in every category we are obliged to measure, the result is zero.