The After

Not the only film about grief to feature in the 2024 Best Live Action Short Oscar shortlist, Misan Harriman’s contribution centres on a tightly wound performance by David Oyelowo. It’s a film focused on what happens when grief is kept inside, unprocessed – when trying too hard to continue with life in the way society at large expects pushes a man to breaking point.

We see only a little of the before, but the chemistry between the characters is sufficient to explain the weight of the protagonist’s loss. We also learn something about his life in that period, and the busy career which, we might reasonably surmise, meant he didn’t spend as much time with his loved ones as he would have liked to. Most of the film takes place once the damage has been done, and is focused on him alone, in close-up, reckoning with an anniversary and a birthday.

One way to escape one’s own life is to immerse oneself in other people’s. As a cab driver, he is caught up in other people’s stories. Their petty arguments, their laughter, and crises which remind him of his own. It’s another thing, however, that eventually hits him where nothing else has: an encounter with a girl who reminds him of his daughter and who, unlike anyone else we see, notices his pain.

It’s difficult to get the balance right with a film like this. Harriman crafts a careful montage in which we see everything reflected through Oyelowo’s eyes even as his character maintains a careful emotional distance. The performance is everything, the other details structured around it. In the cab we get a sense of the passing of time, or the rest of the world going about its business, of endless stories we might follow instead, but Oyelowo hold us there in a single endless moment.