A woman named Kate (Fruzsina Nagy) drives down a road.  We don’t know where she is driving to but we can tell that she’s driving quickly and she’s not in the mood for any delays.  It’s the way that someone drives when they’re trying to escape but they’re not sure where they want to go.  It’s way you drive when you just want to convince yourself that you can somehow leave everything behind.

We hear what sounds like an accident and suddenly, Kate is waking up in a forest.  Her car is nowhere to be seen and Kate has no idea how she came to be in the forest.  In fact, she’s not even sure who she was before she woke up.  She has no memories of her past life, beyond fleeting visions that don’t always seem to fit together.  Eventually, she meets another apparent amnesiac, Bubba (Edward Apeagyei).  Bubba wears a locket around his neck and there’s a picture of a woman in the locket but he doesn’t seem to be quite sure who she was.

Bubba and Kate are not alone in the forest.  There are other wanderers and then there’s a group of men who appear to be soldiers, wearing crude uniforms and gas masks and carrying machine guns.  (The sight of the soldiers, with their crude uniforms, bring to mind the horrific militias that often spring up in the aftermath of a war and attempt to seize power out of the chaos.)  Receiving cryptic orders from their leader (Eric Roberts), the soldiers patrol the forest and execute anyone that they come across.  Their leader repeatedly tells them that they have to track down and execute everyone because the future of the world depends upon it.  Failure is not an option.

Aftermath deals with a very real fear.  The idea of suddenly waking up and discovering that you have not only lost your identity but also control over your own fate is at the heart of many horror stories and it’s also a reflection of the way many people feel about living in today’s world.  One wrong word, thought, or move and you can find yourself exiled into both a real and metaphorical wilderness.  When Kate wakes up with little memory of what the world was like before she ended up in that forest, she’s feeling what a lot of people have felt when they try to remember the world and their lives before the lockdowns of 2020 and all of the political and societal events that followed.  We live in a world that seems to change from day to day and, as result, everyone has had that moment when, like Kate, they’ve struggled to understand what’s happening.  From the minute that Kate wakes up with the feeling that she has no control over what’s happening to her, she becomes an instantly relatable character.  The audience not only wants to know what’s happening to her but they also want her to regain control of her fate.  If Kate can regain control, then those watching in the audience can also regain control.

The film’s cinematography emphasizes both the grandeur and the ominous atmosphere of the forest, making it a place that manages to be beautiful and threatening at the same time and the deliberate pace builds up suspense as Kate tries to discover why she is in the forest.  Fruzsina Nagy and Edward Apeagyei both give sympathetic and relatable performances as Kate and Bubba and the audience does care what happens to them.  Aftermath is both an intriguing thriller and a meditation on life and love.

Aftermath will be released on digital and blu-ray by Bayview Entertainment on January 30th.