After Hours 4K 1985 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A mediocre editor experiences the worst night of his life after he meets a girl in a coffee shop and agrees to visit her in Soho.

Review 4K Movie

Programmer Paul Hackett, as befits a true workaholic, is fixated on his work. But by chance he meets a pretty girl Marcy in a cafe and soon finds himself in her apartment, located in the bohemian neighborhood of Soho, in lower Manhattan. It is here that one of the most nightmarish and bizarre nights of his life begins....

The party, to put it mildly, is off to a bad start. The new girlfriend suddenly throws a tantrum and intends to commit suicide. Hackett decides to flee before it's too late, but instead of the comfort of his own apartment he finds himself in the epicenter of a criminal neighborhood from which he can't get out. Hiding from an ever-increasing number of pursuers, he finds himself at a club party of deranged punks, then visiting a crazy "blue stocking", then in the studio of no less crazy sculptor... In the end exhausted Hackett, who has experienced the most incredible adventures with threats, fears and obsessions, touched the very bottom of the urban hell, also unexpectedly gets out of it with the first rays of the sun ...

In the mid-1980s, Reagan's America was reaping the bountiful fruits of post-industrial triumph. The new technocrats, the yuppies - high-class professionals and exemplary fathers of families - ruled flawlessly over this well-oiled system, a symbol of consumer paradise and comfort that would inevitably multiply within its borders, especially after the fall of the "red wall" in Eastern Europe. It was at this moment that several directors of different "weight categories" and creative aspirations opened the same door to a disturbing and strange irrational world.

It happened at the very moment when the world was hit by the baby boom: with the easy hand of Spielberg and Zemeckis, everyone rushed to shoot blockbusters aimed at teenagers, bringing crazy money to the movies. In the shadow of this tsunami just formed a mini-wave of anxiety, expressed in the emergence of a series of films united in a sub-genre codenamed "yuppies in danger". To this series, first of all, include: "Susan's Desperate Search for Susan (1985) by Susan Seidelman, Jonathan Demme's The Hell of It (1986), and, in part, David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)....

Behind the door of an orderly, computer-adjusted world, something informal and uncontrolled was revealed. In the case of Paul Hackett, that something is a night town filled with paranoid fears and populated by vamp women - insidious temptresses who prey on men, werewolves, doppelgangers and a rabble of all sorts of declasse elements. And though everything that has happened to Hackett resembles a hallucination, the facade of prosperity topples overnight and looks like a pure moulage after the incident. But a brief lapse into the irrational world allows Paul to gain new experience and defeat numerous insidious villains. And the horror, he experienced, is so mesmerizing that it looks not real, but rather fabulous.

It was quite an unexpected turn in the work of Scorsese, who made the second risky "trick" after the failed "King of Comedy" (1982). As a result, the director's key theme - the flawed desire of the average American to bend the course of things to his will - finds here an unusual genre refraction. This time, the typical "yuppie" finds himself absolutely dependent on the course of events, which draws him into a vortex of absurd nightmares and gignol horrors, surrealist banter and eccentric adventures. In this nocturnal New York, different laws and characters rule the ball - not the ones you see during the day.

Black comedies of this type are always identity issues. The viewer, as a rule, who considers himself smarter than the hapless hero, does not want to identify with the character of a bad guy, and without this is not always built a proper contact with the movie itself. Therefore, such noir comedies usually do not become hits. Picture "After Hours" corresponded to this rule in full: with a budget of $4.5 million. it collected in North America only ten and a half million bucks, which in commercial terms hardly satisfied the studio's ambitions. But Scorsese personally rehabilitated himself to the full at the Cannes Film Festival (1986), where he won the third most important prize - for Best Director.