Netflix Short ‘The After’ Depicts a Shocking Tragedy and a Father’s Grief

In Netflix’s live-action short The After, a man named Dayo (David Oyelowo, who also serves as executive producer) loses his wife and child in a brutal public display of violence. Describing his film’s intense and shocking opening scene, director Misan Harriman compares it to “an act of God” — one born out of the “collective trauma of 2020.” What follows is Dayo’s recovery as he draws into himself, taking on a job as a rideshare driver to limit the intimacy of interactions with others — that is, until a family of three riders forces him to confront his long-simmering emotions. 

Oyelowo says it was Harriman’s work as a photographer that inspired him to join the film, which Harriman co-wrote with John Julius Schwabach. “I had been paying attention to his photographs during the Black Lives Matter movement in that hellacious period of COVID,” says the actor. “Each of those images struck me as a story in and of itself. He was capturing not just an image but the soul of the subject of the image.” 

As Harriman and Oyelowo spoke about what they had both experienced during that time, it was clear to Oyelowo that the filmmaker had homed in on an emotional truth about humanity and reckoning. “It both scared me and [drew me] like a moth to the flame,” Oyelowo adds. “It was daring to touch the corners that we had all been forced to entertain. This guy wanted to tell the truth — what was I scared of?”

Like much of what Harriman captured on film in 2020, the events of The After take place largely in public — places where emotions like grief are typically hidden from view. As Dayo suppresses his mourning, he finds the perfect vocation in driving strangers across London. “If you think of how many times we use rideshare, how often do you think about the story of the man or woman that is in charge of you and taking you where you need to go?” says Harriman. “Where are their homes? What are their fears? You don’t really go there.”

But in The After, Dayo is forced to reckon with his child’s absence when he picks up a couple and their daughter, which results in a cathartic scene on the street where Dayo completely breaks down — forcing his riders to witness his pain. 

“Grief is shocking, even when the loss is expected,” says Oyelowo, who channeled his own experience losing his father in September 2020 and his mother three years earlier. “We have coping mechanisms that allow us to still laugh, to eat, to go about our day,” he adds. “But the reality is that grief impacts our bodies, minds, souls and spirits. It will manifest in one way or another, and in the 18 minutes of this film, Misan really tapped into this honesty.”

This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.