Aftermath Parent Guide

Kevin (Shawn Ashmore) and Natalie Dadich (Ashley Greene) have been struggling since an affair which nearly destroyed their marriage. Their counselor has recommended a change of scenery, but house prices aren’t cheap. Luckily, in Kevin’s work as a crime-scene cleaner, he’s found a house he thinks will be perfect. Better yet, he knows he can get it cheap, since he recently cleaned up a murder-suicide there. But when he talks Natalie into it, they find that the house may have more than a bad history – it has a dangerous future.

Now, I’m a big fan of haunted house movies. I love the spooky atmosphere, the slowly building tension, the unpleasant sounds in the dark…all of it. This is not that. This is a poorly written high school melodrama in haunted house drag. It’s turgid and overwrought and I thoroughly disliked every minute of it.

The dialogue oscillates wildly between tolerable and outright awful. Given the current price of lumber, the filmmakers probably would have improved their profit margin by sawing their dialogue into boards and selling it as a wood substitute. It doesn’t help that they’ve cut several other corners, including a shot that was noticeably slowed in post-production and a handful of scenes with very obvious dialogue over-dubbing.

As far as family audiences are concerned, this is a real loser in a lot of categories. First, your kids aren’t going to be interested in the constant marital tension/adultery hand-wringing, and second, neither will you. There’s also no small amount of profanity and some fairly gory imagery, although not a lot of on-screen violence. To go with the boring adultery plotline, we also have two sex scenes which feature partial or implied nudity. For some reason, these scenes are back-to-back, which I suppose that makes them easier to skip.

This movie has a certain “made for TV” quality about it, that thin veneer of expensive sets trying to mask discount-bin writing that always leaves a vaguely oily residue on the brain after viewing. It’s a mental liminal space, familiar but fleeting, and deeply unpleasant throughout. This provides an interesting paradox: Having finished the film, most details have oozed out of my brain like a slug confronted with salt, but during viewing I would swear that it was never going to end. What a repellent combination.