In my younger days, I used to enjoy just being out at night. There’s a certain energy to it – like the usual rules don’t quite apply, and anything could happen. Most of the time, nothing does. You just drift, make impulsive decisions, follow wherever the night takes you, and just end up going to bed far later than you should have with nothing to show for it.
As a result, I’ve always been drawn to films that capture that exact feeling. Not horror, not tense thrillers, just those strange, in-between slices of life that only seem to exist after a certain hour. Stuff like Eyes Wide Shut, Lost in Translation, or Naked – films that aren’t really about plot so much as mood. Vibes, if you want to be an insufferable Gen Z prick bout it.
And Martin Scorsese‘s 1985 film After Hours, might be my favourite of this very specific subgenre.
The setup couldn’t be simpler if it tried. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), your standard issue office drone, finishes work, meets a girl (Rosanna Arquette) named Marcy, and decides – against all better judgement – to head downtown at midnight for an opportunity to clap those cheeks.
Unfortunately, things don’t quite go to plan; mainly because Marcy, to put it politely, is completely unhinged. And honestly, what did Paul expect? They bonded over him reading a book in public, which never actually works. What follows is essentially one long, increasingly frustrating attempt for Paul to get back home. Not in any grand, high-stakes way. There’s no ticking clock, no real danger (at least not at first). He’s just trying to get from A to B. That’s it. That’s the entire plot.
Of course, it’s not actually as simple as all that. Paul is caught in some Kafkaesque nightmare, where logic increasingly unravels and every attempt to fix a problem just creates more. Nothing behaves the way it should; people jump to conclusions, situations spiral for no reason, and the simplest task becomes weirdly impossible.
Scorsese is able to take what seems to be a thousand unrelated tiny annoyances that Paul endures, and weave them into this Rube Goldberg machine of punishing coincidence and unintended consequences.
Stuff like he loses his taxi fare, which then means he doesn’t have enough change for the train when he discovers that the price has increased. Or he meets a bartender (played by John Heard) who is willing to give him the money for a train…but he cant open the till, so he sends Paul to his apartment to get the key, where he is mistaken for a burglar.
Paul keeps making slightly bad decisions that snowball into catastrophically bad ones. There are more devastating consequences to his actions that I won’t spoil, but it definitely pushes the film deeply into darker part of dark comedy.
At a certain point, it stops feeling like bad luck and starts feeling like the universe has singled this man out for punishment. Paul might genuinely be one of the unluckiest people in all of cinema. If this film was made today, it’d probably end with him finally getting back to work…on the morning of 11th September, 2001. And he works in the World Trade Centre.
Like all good late-night films, the city does a lot of the heavy lifting. But here it’s not just a backdrop, it’s practically a character in its own right. Everything feels grimy, artificial, and just slightly off, like reality’s been nudged a few degrees in the wrong direction.
Michael Ballhaus’ cinematography leans into that unease, drifting through downtown New York like a nervous ghost. Tight, claustrophobic interiors give way to endless, oppressive streets, all populated by the sort of asinine freaks you only ever seem to meet after midnight.
Where something Eyes Wide Shut makes its nighttime city feel mysterious, After Hours makes it actively uncooperative. Every place Paul ends up is the wrong place at the worst possible time; like when he meets Gail (Catherine O’Hara, yes, both of Kevin’s parents are in this film), who offers to “help” him with a phone call but is really just another obstacle in human form.
And I don’t think it’s a nuclear level hot take to say that this sort of thing is very much Martin Scorsese’s wheelhouse. A man spiralling through a hostile city, losing control one bad decision at a time – it’s the same DNA as Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, just without as much violence.
There’s also this creeping sense that everything might be connected, that there’s some kind of pattern behind all the chaos. But if there is, it’s completely useless. The film keeps hinting at meaning, only to pull away from it, until morning rolls around and nothing has actually been resolved.
Paul ends up right back where he started – back at work, back in his normal life, like the entire night just hit reset. No lesson learned. No grand revelation. No character arc tying it all together. It just ends.
Which is probably the most accurate part of the film. Because anyone who has been on a night out that has overstayed its welcome, will understand that nights like that don’t mean anything. They just happen, drag on longer than they should, and then it’s over.
After Hours is strange, draining, darkly funny, and deeply uncomfortable. Every frame and camera move keeps you slightly off balance, with the city itself acting like a quiet accomplice in Paul’s misery, that dry, almost cruel humour always lurking just beneath it all.
It feels real. And in a late-night, existential, cult movie kind of way that’s terrifyingly perfect. It’s like getting stuck on the wrong train at 2 a.m., surrounded by crackheads, nutjobs, and the exact sort of freaks who only come out when sensible people are asleep, and realising you really, really should’ve just stayed home.
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