Hey, ladies!  Take it from someone who has been there, if your family home is destroyed in a storm and someone offers to help you rebuild it so that you have a place to live with your adorable Siberian Husky, accept the help.  I don’t care if you used to date him.  I don’t care if you’re engaged to marry someone else.  That person that you think you’re going to marry?  Where is he?  He’s not the one at your house offering to help your rebuild.  The man who does show up, does he have a criminal record?  Does he have a history of being an abuser?  Is he a Nazi?  If the answers to those three questions are all no then accept the help and be sure to say thank you every chance you get.

After the Storm is about Lauren (Madeleine Leon), who reconnects with her ex-boyfriend Colin (Bo Yokely) after a storm destroys her home.  Lauren is a teacher, which is extremely cool.  I like and respect teachers.  And she owns an adorable dog!  I liked that Lauren was as concerned about rebuilding the community as she was rebuilding her house.  I could relate.  Last year, our neighborhood got hit by one of the worst storms that I’ve ever seen and it took over a month for the city to clean up all the debris and ge everything back and running.  I checked on my neighbors every day to see if they needed anything and a lot of very kind people helped us clean up the branches in the front and back yards.  (One of them had fallen on our wooden swing, crushing it underneath.)  Cleaning up wasn’t easy but we worked together and got it done and we were stronger as a community as a result.

But I got so frustrated watching this movie because Lauren kept getting upset whenever Colin tried to help her and I couldn’t understand why.  She was still angry about how they broke up five years in the past but Colin had obviously grown up since then and he wanted to help both her and the community.  The movie lost me whenever Lauren get angry with Colin.  Her main excuse was that she was engaged but when her fiancé did show up, he turned out to be useless.  Lauren’s stubbornness was hard to take.

I did like Bo Yokely as Colin.  Colin was a good friend to have in a disaster and, when it came to Lauren, he had the patience of a saint.  I got frustrated with Lauren but I did enjoy the scenes of her house being rebuilt once Laruen finally accepted the help and admitted that she was still in love with Colin.  You’d have to have a heart of stone not to smile at Colin carrying Lauren over the threshold while that adorable dog.  Love can overcome anything, even stubbornness.