There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in “The Aftermath,” an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story set in the rubble of post-World War II Germany.
A few months after Allied bombs have reduced Hamburg to smoldering ash, British officer Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke) requisitions a stately home on the city’s outskirts and sends for his wife, Rachael (Keira Knightley), a sadly beautiful waif who is still processing traumatic memories from the Blitz. Morgan, whose colleagues snicker at him behind his back for going “queer for the natives,” is appalled at the impoverishment and dispossession suffered by the German people.
When the owner of the Morgans’ new home — a handsome architect named Stephen Lubert — prepares to move out, along with his teenage daughter, Morgan insists that he stay. With a possible former Nazi lurking in the attic while a clueless British husband and his bitter wife are enjoying luxe accommodations down below, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. But, in the final analysis, not nearly enough. Based on Rhidian Brook’s book of the same name, “The Aftermath” is inspired by the author’s grandfather, a British colonel who also commandeered a German home after the war and also refused to evict its owners. One would hope that’s where the similarities end in a story that promises to be a provocative examination of moral culpability and mutual incomprehension and resentment, but winds up being a plotty, naughty potboiler.
