Matters of the heart take precedence over monster hunting in the romantic horror comedy AFTER MIDNIGHT, on DVD from Umbrella Entertainment.

After his long-suffering girlfriend of ten years Abby (Brea Grant, APARTMENT 413) walks out on him and seemingly skips town, bar owner Hank (writer/co-director Jeremy Gardner, BLISS) seems to his friends – including town sheriff and Abby's brother Shane (Justin Benson, director and star of SPRING and THE ENDLESS) as well as drinking buddy Wade (Henry Zebrowski) – to be coming unglued at the seams as he spends each night with a shotgun waiting for something that might be a cougar or a bear that seems to be trying to claw its way into his Victorian fixer-upper. He sleep during the day is troubled by dreams of better days with Abby and his inability to figure out just what went wrong between them, while no amount of claw marks in his barricaded front door and broken bear traps can convince anyone else that something dangerous is really after Hank, and it seems like the return of Abby might be even more shocking than any monster lurking in the darkness.

AFTER MIDNIGHT is a monster movie in which the monster is a metaphor for fear of commitment; and, indeed, someone even makes the observation that hunter Hank is in constant need of something to chase. The first half of the movie seriously drags in almost the same manner as Alex Garland's bigger budget sci-fi film ANNIHILATION in which each subsequent use of acoustically-scored, lens-flarey flashbacks to a seemingly idyllic relationship makes the viewer question the reliability of the main character's point-of-view (and in this case, whether the monster symbolizes Hank's guilt for possibly murdering his girlfriend). This goes on for far too long, and the quirky humor brought by supporting players Benson and Zebrowski seems forced while the monster action consists of darting shadows in the night. After the half-way point, however, we get a twelve minute single-take duologue scene between Gardner and Grant in which their chemistry seems entirely authentic and both actors manage to stand out from the mumblecore ilk as believable human beings. From that point on, the film's easygoing manner is compelling even as the all the actors seem to be partially ad-libbing, culminating in an oddball party sequence in which Hank's karaoke performance of Lisa Loeb's "Stay" is simultaneously funny and charming, and sure to resonate with viewer who grew up in the nineties. The film is quite an experimental departure from Gardner's previous indie zombie film THE BATTERY and not entirely successful; however, it is enough to make one want to see how Gardner next tries to tackle the genre.