After Everything

Marks and Power deliver that unicorn of romance movies. It’s funny, heartbreaking, but, most of all, intelligent and realistic.

With real soul and gravitas, Marks and Power craft romantic drama that demonstrates that life’s hardest challenges can come at any age.

It's the hugely appealing White and Monroe who authoritatively carry the film, mining the material for all its pathos and humor and displaying the sort of chemistry more often aspired to than achieved in romantic films. They make it look easy, as do the talented filmmakers.

The true star of the movie is its structure. By cleaving the action in two, both the development of Elliott and Mia’s relationship and what happens after its peak are given their just due. It’s certainly something to make someone who is sure she already knows where the story is going think: Who cares? I’m with these characters, anyway.

Its refractory tone, both deadpan and swoony, announces that the first-time feature directors have a phenomenal eye for character (which is something those who’ve been watching Marks’ work as an actress may already have realized).

Jeremy Allen White (“Shameless”) and Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) shine in this dramedy.

The young couple exists in a bubble of love that has an air of reality sucked right out of it.