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The Midnight After

Play trailer 2:01 Poster for The Midnight After 2014 2h 4m Comedy Mystery & Thriller Play Trailer Watchlist
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A minibus full of passengers arrives in another dimension where a deadly virus sweeps the city.

Critics Reviews

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Jessica Kiang The Playlist 02/21/2014
C
...if you go in prepared for its exploitative excesses and can check your expectations of such conceits as "logic," "character consistency" and "coherence" at the door, you might be in for a blast. Just don't expect any of it to make a lick of sense. Go to Full Review
Panos Kotzathanasis Asian Movie Pulse 01/26/2020
"The Midnight After" is a very interesting production that manages to work both as a quirky/surreal dystopian film and as a comment regarding the current and future situation of Hong Kong. Go to Full Review
Anna Tatarska Movie Mezzanine 03/13/2014
B
An utterly disarming experience. Go to Full Review
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Audience Reviews

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mark c 05/29/2020 The only reason this embarrassment to Hong Kong films is getting half a star is because the system wouldn't accept a zero. Being a political metaphor doesn't excuse you to make a completely nonsensical film with an idiotic script. A true waste of everyone's time. One of the worst films I've watched, ever. See more 07/21/2018 Discombobulating, but everything makes sense from a metaphorical perspective. Think pergatory. See more 03/23/2018 The TV show Lost should have ended like this. See more 02/19/2018 Probably the worst movie I have ever seen. See more c y 08/20/2017 Thrilling, creative and hilarious, but it contains awful car stunts, and the plot was incomplete, leaving a lot of questions for the audience to ask, e.g. why the rain was red in colour? why Yuki often becomes so scary? Why he Japanese said they would save them, but at last crashed them with cars? And the biggest question is, why would Hong Kong people disappear? See more jesse o 08/26/2016 I don't even know where to begin with this movie if I'm being completely honest. I guess first things first, as there is no description for this movie, I'll start with that. A group of people riding the minibus emerge from a tunnel only to discover that they are the only people left in Hong Kong. The rest of the film deals with that fact and how the group tries to figure out what exactly went wrong with them when they passed under that tunnel. Look, the film doesn't get the rating it did because it was bad. If you look at some of the scenes out of context, then the film isn't really that bad at all. The problem is that you should not come into the film expecting any answers whatsoever. Like absolutely none. None of your questions about what happened will be answered at any point whatsoever. The goal for the characters, after a certain point, becomes to leave where they're at to head to this mountain, where it seems like something massive is about to happen. The problem is the fact that the movie ends just as the characters are, back on the minibus, on the way to the mountain. Talk about fucking infuriating. Having to watch an entire movie of red herrings, because that's all this is, for 2 goddamn, motherfucking hours only for them to not actually resolve any of the bullshit they try to push as a 'narrative'. Not to mention that they refuse to answer any of your questions, but the movie literally makes no sense whatsoever. Part of me gets the idea to be as vague as humanly possible on the build-up to the climax, the filmmakers want to keep you as much in the dark as the characters themselves are. But to spend 2 hours building up to this and then refusing to, literally, answer any of the questions you set up is so fucking cheap. I have no problem with films leaving their endings more open-ended, but in those cases, they do at least try to give you enough answers for you to debate what really happened. There's no such thing here. All you know is that there's some sort of virus. You never find out how it travels, if it's airborne, if it's by having contact with someone with the virus, you don't know what the song Major Tom by David Bowie has to do with anything, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is brought up, there's also a Japanese guy that apparently was a student of one of the passengers in the minibus that wants to help save all of the passengers, there's the phone call to one character by his girlfriend who, apparently, says that they have been missing for six years and it's actually 2018, this character seeing this woman, who was also on the minibus, as sort of a ghostly figure in some scenes. I'm sure I missed other plot points the film tried to get across, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. All of those things the film brings up without actually answering any of them. And this isn't the type of movie that's so interesting that you want to try and figure it out on yourself like The Wall, an excellent Austrian movie. It's just not that interesting of a movie. There's parts at the start that are interesting, like once they find themselves in this situation, I was intrigued by the plot, but I quickly lost hope. I can't say that I predicted that nothing would be resolved, but my subconscious probably wasn't surprised by this at all. The film also suffers from some horrifying tonal shifts. Sometimes the film wants to be horror, sometimes it wants to be comedy, sometimes it wants to be about how human are the real monsters. All of these elements are handled awfully. It's like you're watching 17 films in one. You know what, now that I think about it, this film was quite bad. But it's also not bad at the same time, it's the strangest thing. The movie tried to be clever, but they wrote themselves into a corner in regards of how to end it. So to avoid having to think of absolutely anything resembling a satisfying ending, or anything resembling an ACTUAL ending, they just refused to give you one. These are 2 hours of my life that I can never get back. Never. And I fucking hate myself for watching this. Maybe that's a little harsh, but this movie is really annoying. I wonder what would have happened if I knew beforehand that this movie would have no ending. I don't think it would've changed anything. I would have still been as pissed off as I am now. This film was designed to be infuriating, it wasn't designed to be enjoyed. It's as if Fruit Chan decided to just make a movie that would piss off as many people as humanly possible. And I don't know if it worked, since I don't know how many people in Hong Kong watched this, but it certainly pissed me off. And I know I shouldn't let a film annoy me this way, it has too much power over me that way, but I really hated watching this. It's a terrible movie and it's something that no one should ever actually make an effort to watch. See more Read all reviews
The Midnight After

My Rating

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Movie Info

Synopsis A minibus full of passengers arrives in another dimension where a deadly virus sweeps the city.
Director
Fruit Chan
Producer
Amy Chin
Screenwriter
Chan Fai-Hung, Fruit Chan
Production Co
Film Development Fund of Hong Kong, Golden Scene, Sun Entertainment Culture
Genre
Comedy, Mystery & Thriller
Original Language
Chinese
Release Date (Streaming)
Jun 21, 2016
Runtime
2h 4m