SPOILERS are ahead for After We Fell.
With After We Fell out in the world, once again, the After fandom is back on the waiting game, this time with the final movie in the series to go. Throughout the latest movie starring Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Tessa and Hardin find themselves at a crossroads as argument after argument bookends their otherwise passionate love affair. When After We Fell reaches its final moments, audiences get a cliffhanger ending that left many with goosebumps, including the filmmakers.
At the end of After We Fell, Hardin deals with some family drama when he catches his mother with Christian Vance, who also happens to be one half of the married couple who Tessa has been staying with in Seattle as she begins her career with his company, Vance Publishing. It happens a day before the wedding of Hardin’s mom too! Right as the movie ends, Tessa nudges Hardin to grab a drink with Vance and talk it out after he explodes on him. Vance then comes clean to Hardin that his love affair with his mom has been going on for decades, and he is actually his biological father. What a twist!
After We Fell officially ends when Hardin leaves the restaurant where he heard the news and falls right into the arms of Josephine Langford before the credits roll. CinemaBlend spoke to the film’s director Castille Landon, and she couldn’t help but gush about filming the cliffhanger scene in particular. In her words:
God, I loved that day because it was just as magical. There aren’t many times when you’re on set and it feels as magical as it looks on camera. Like the jacuzzi for instance, to be honest it was not a romantic moment. It was like 30 degrees, we were freezing, everyone’s pruned up because they’re in the water. It was very difficult to shoot that. But that big sweeping crane at the end, you could feel it.
Castille Landon is a first-time director in the After franchise following Roger Kumble taking on After We Collided and Jenny Gage helming the first 2019 movie. Landon had the chance to shoot After We Fell and the upcoming sequel After We Happy back to back, and is already developing two spinoffs about Tessa and Hardin. Landon continued to gush about filming the sequence with CinemaBlend:
You could almost hear the music, and I knew I wanted to set it to that song since the very beginning when we were working on the script. But, you could hear it when you were watching it in person. It was really, really beautiful and those actors, they hit the marks every time and there is a lot of technical expertise in that moment and it all went off without a hitch. It took us like five times doing it, which is nothing. It was great.
The song was “Never Say Never” by The Fray, which was released back in 2009, but now has a new meaning to fans as it capped off the third finale of the After films. It’s certainly an emotional ending as Hardin deals with a shocking truth about his past following him and Tessa going through the ringer in the movie. It reminds us that not only is this the beginning of the end for Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes Tiffin’s Tessa and Hardin, but it's also a moment in time when they will need one another as the series soon concludes. After We Fell is now available to rent and own on digital.
