After Everything Review: Is Hardin’s Soul Searching Worth the Hype?
The After series, born from Wattpad fanfiction, has carved a tumultuous, often controversial, path through the landscape of young adult romance. At its heart lies the volatile, magnetic, and undeniably problematic figure of Hardin Scott – the brooding, tattooed British bad boy whose love for Tessa Young is as passionate as it is destructive. After four films charting their cyclonic relationship, the fifth installment, After Everything, arrives promising a singular focus: Hardin’s much-needed, long-overdue journey of self-discovery and soul-searching. The question looms large: After years of witnessing his self-sabotage, anger, and addiction, is Hardin’s solitary quest for redemption truly worth the hype?
To understand the weight of this question, one must first acknowledge the “hype” itself. For millions of fans, the After saga has been a dark, intoxicating fantasy, a dive into the perilous waters of a “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” romance. Hardin, despite – or perhaps because of – his deeply flawed nature, became an anti-hero archetype, a testament to the allure of the reformed bad boy. Yet, for critics and many viewers, the series glamorized toxic cycles, presenting a love story built on emotional abuse, gaslighting, and the repeated tearing down and rebuilding of two individuals. The “hype” wasn’t for his growth, but for his chaos. Therefore, the pivot to Hardin’s isolated introspection in After Everything was not merely a narrative choice; it was a desperate necessity, a tacit admission that the character, and by extension the series, had to evolve or risk becoming utterly irredeemable.
After Everything plunges us into Hardin’s world post-Tessa, a world stripped bare of the constant push-and-pull that defined his existence. He is in Lisbon, ostensibly working on his second novel, but truly adrift, haunted by the specter of his past and the profound absence of the one person who anchored his chaotic world. This is where the “soul-searching” begins. We see Hardin attempting to confront his demons head-on: his traumatic childhood, his self-destructive patterns, his inability to sustain healthy relationships. He seeks therapy, albeit briefly and with trademark resistance. He revisits key figures from his past, not in search of reconciliation, but of understanding – a quiet excavation of the roots of his anger. Most notably, he funnels his anguish into his writing, a cathartic process that serves as both confessional and an attempt at self-reconstruction.
The film attempts to illustrate this internal struggle through visual metaphors of solitude: long, reflective gazes into the ocean, the isolation of his apartment, the quiet click of his keyboard. There’s a commendable intention here to finally place the onus of change squarely on Hardin himself, rather than relying on Tessa’s unwavering forgiveness to act as his moral compass. The narrative suggests that true growth cannot happen in the shadow of co-dependency; it requires facing oneself in the stark, unforgiving light of loneliness.
However, the efficacy of this soul-searching, and whether it ultimately justifies the preceding narrative’s excesses or the audience’s long-held “hype,” remains debatable. The film, constrained by its runtime and the inherent limitations of cinematic portrayal, often feels more like a montage of self-pity than a profound journey of transformation. Hardin’s insights, while present, frequently lack the depth one would expect from years of accumulated trauma and toxic behavior. His revelations often feel like surface-level acknowledgments rather than deeply earned epiphanies. The audience is told he is changing, but the internal shifts are frequently depicted in broad strokes, a cinematic shorthand for a process that in reality takes years of painful, incremental work.
Furthermore, a persistent critique of Hardin’s character has been his self-centeredness. While After Everything aims to break this pattern by showing him alone, much of his introspection still revolves around his own pain, his own inability to be happy, rather than a truly remorseful reckoning with the damage he inflicted on Tessa. The film attempts to show him evolving past this, but the shadow of his previous self looms large, making his newfound calm feel, at times, like a convenient resolution rather than a truly earned peace. The “hype” was for a dramatic overhaul, a character reborn from the ashes, and what we get often feels more like a character tidied up for a franchise conclusion.
Ultimately, Hardin’s soul-searching in After Everything is less about being “worth the hype” for its groundbreaking profundity and more about being a necessary, albeit imperfect, capstone to a contentious saga. It’s a vital step for a character who desperately needed to move beyond the cycle of toxicity that defined him. The film serves as a conceptual acknowledgment that love, no matter how passionate, cannot be built on a foundation of unresolved trauma and self-destruction. While its execution may at times feel rushed or superficial, the very act of dedicating an entire film to Hardin’s internal struggle sends a crucial message: real growth is solitary work. It may not be the cathartic, deeply transformative arc that some fans hyped themselves up for, nor does it fully erase the problematic implications of the series that came before. But it is a necessary, perhaps even brave, attempt to end Hardin Scott’s story not with another dramatic fight, but with the quiet, arduous work of finding oneself – a journey that, like life itself, is often more messy than magnificent, but indispensable nonetheless.
