Trust Is the Scariest Streetlight

Read Time:5 Minute, 21 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
After Dark (Mørkeblind)
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Genre: Thriller, Drama, Short
Year Released: 2024
Runtime: 10m
Director(s): Iain Forbes
Writer(s): Andreas Lübker
Cast: Simen Bostad, Billie Barker, Håkon Ramstad
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 CPH Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: AFTER DARK is a compact morality play about what we owe a stranger when our instincts disagree. In ten minutes, it sets up a classic 'what would you do' scenario: a man on his way home meets a young woman who needs help getting to the station. He decides to walk with her. From there, the film becomes a tug-of-war between two impulses—compassion and self-protection—played out on quiet streets where every footstep sounds like a decision.

Iain Forbes stages this with a confidence that suits the premise. The film doesn’t waste time proving it’s “about” anything; it simply places a good-natured guy and an anxious stranger shoulder to shoulder and lets tension grow out of human behavior. Simen Bostad gives Kristian an approachable, soft-edged presence; you can see the yes forming in his mouth before he says it. Billie Barker’s Mia offers just enough urgency to make refusal feel cruel, and just enough opacity to make compliance feel risky. That’s the movie’s center: each new breath nudges us to recalibrate trust without ever spelling out the correct answer.

For a short time, the material feels appropriately scaled—one night, two people, a simple goal complicated by doubt. The strongest choice is how the film traffics in tiny social cues: how close they walk, where their eyes go, how quickly explanations arrive, how long silences stretch before someone fills them. Those decisions build more suspense than a jump scare ever could. It’s the grown-up version of stranger danger—no sermonizing, just the recognition that adult life is full of gray areas where safety and decency collide.

Where the short absolutely works is in its command of escalation. The walk is a line with a destination, but the conversation loops, stalls, and blooms in uneasy ways. The film uses that friction to ask the audience for complicity: do we want Kristian to keep helping, or to give up? Every time we answer, a detail pushes us toward the opposite conclusion. That seesaw is effective because it’s honest—most of us have stood on a late-night corner and wondered whether to step forward or step away.

AFTER DARK is tightly constructed, the night setting is functional rather than decorative: empty sidewalks, chilly air that you can almost see, and just enough ambient noise to make you hyper-aware of your surroundings. The choices around framing and proximity are purposeful—two-shots that feel tentative, over-the-shoulders that deny us full information, and quick reframes that mimic how our attention snaps when we sense something off. Sound is used sparingly but well; the hush is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and when dialogue interrupts it, you feel the stakes rise.

Thematically, the short taps into a modern anxiety born of headlines and lived experience: the fear of being tricked and the fear of being cruel. It doesn’t lean on either side of that equation. Instead, it presents a night where both fears are valid, then asks us to live with that discomfort. That’s a more generous approach than most social-issue thrillers, which often pick a moral victor and stack the deck. AFTER DARK stacks nothing; it lets two people try to read each other under poor lighting.

There’s also a quiet critique of performative safety politics—how quickly we outsource empathy to policy or platitude, and how different it feels when the decision is personal, immediate, and accountable. The film doesn’t say “always help” or “protect yourself first”; it says the calculus changes with context, and the context changes by the second. In practice, that’s exactly right, and it’s why the short hums with unease from start to finish.

If Forbes returns to this world, there’s a compelling feature-length path: not bigger, just deeper. Maintain the structure, let the scene unfold in real time, and expand the conversation into layers—class, gender, design, and the knowledge of danger. Keep ambiguity as a texture rather than a twist. The short already proves he can withhold information without cheating; a longer exploration would let him explore not only what these two think of each other, but what they think of themselves when fear becomes the editor of memory.

As a ten-minute snapshot, though, AFTER DARK succeeds at what it sets out to do. It makes you think about your next late-night decision, knowing full well there may never be a perfect answer. You leave wondering whether you would have done the kind thing, the safe thing, or some imperfect compromise that you’d replay in your head on the walk home. That’s a worthy result for a film this brief: not a lecture, a scenario you can’t easily shake.

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