Almost painful to sit through. Story could be condensed into a minute long, bad dialog spaced out with awful montages. Predictable and very very very cringy.

"After" is a Drama - Romance movie in which we watch a young woman falling in love with a young man who is very complicated because of his dark past and some choices he has done. They both have to find out how they can work things out in order to be together.

I did not have high expectations from this movie and that is the main reason I was not disappointed. This movie has a poor and boring plot, without any plot twists or surprises to make it even a little bit interesting and it's mainly consists of major clichés. The interpretations of the cast followed the same pattern of the plot and direction, and they were below average. Finally, I have to say that I have not read any of the books and I only take into my consideration the movie which I found dreadful and I believe that I wasted my time watching it, I do not recommend it to anyone.

At a crucial moment in "After," Tessa Hardin makes a request of Hardin Scott: "Just go slow." But it turns out that the two characters do the exact opposite in their whirlwind and tumultuous relationship.

Based on the Anne Todd novel of the same name, which has been advertised as "1 billion reads," "After" is self-referential film to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." The Austen novel is mentioned frequently and is the subject of a class assignment of Tessa and Hardin in a university English literature course.

Tessa and Hardin see themselves refracted through the lens of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice." But they never seem to grasp how Austen spent the entire novel in developing the courtship before Darcy and Elizabeth finally declare their love. By contrast, it is a veritable race to a full-blown, live-in relationship in "After" with Tessa instantly dumping her old beau Noah and moving in with Hardin. The Tessa-Hardin relationship is stormy, facilitated by the cruelty of their "friends." Instead of courting one another, the two characters are courting disaster.

A weakness of the film is that Tessa and Hardin were students who hardly ever seemed to study. In the bonus track of the DVD, there were several deleted scenes where the students are at least seen cracking a book. But in the final film cut, the characters seem to arrive in college fully prepared and having completed all of the readings for a liberal arts curriculum. Their declared majors may be Economics or English, but their true course of study "The Relatonship."

It is difficult to flesh out any themes from this film that primarily dramatizes the ebb-and-flow of the relationship of Tessa and Hardin. The couple seems to bond around a rough childhood in which Hardin had an absent father and Tessa was abandoned by hers. One of the most touching relationships was that of Tessa and her over-protective mother. So, the main takeaway of this film is something like "there's no place like home" and, above all, in matters of the heart, follow your own advice: "Just go slow!"