‘The Aftermath’ is a gorgeous wartime romance with little heat

“The Aftermath” opens in 1945 and could easily have been made then, too. An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.

It is, though, stunningly pretty as Rachael (Keira Knightley), a resentful British Army wife, arrives in bombed-out Hamburg to join her high-ranking husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke).

“It’s chaos out there,” Lewis remarks as they drive through perfectly scattered rubble, yet this stolid, stagy movie transmits no sense of destabilization.

As if to remedy that, we meet Stephan (Alexander Skarsgard, resplendent in a series of snazzy woolen jumpers), the lonesome German widower whose luxurious home Lewis has requisitioned. Stephan and his troubled daughter (Flora Thiemann) might have obligingly moved into the attic, but that won’t stop him from doing some requisitioning of his own.

Few can smolder like Skarsgard, yet his inevitable affair with Rachael has little heat. Each has a heartbreaking reason to distrust the other; but instead of exploring the wary psychological dance between victor and vanquished, grief and acceptance, the director, James Kent (working from Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse’s adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s 2013 novel), leaps from hostility to adultery with preposterous speed. While the cinematographer, Franz Lustig, conjures gauzy flashbacks and glowing glamour shots, promising subplots — like Stephan’s possibly murky past and his daughter’s dalliance with a dangerous young Hitler sympathizer — are hastily snuffed out.

Had Kent (who excelled in 2015 with the World War I drama “Testament of Youth”) diverted a fraction of the cost of his lavish production design to beefing up the screenplay, this corny melodrama might have had a chance of pleasing our minds as much as our eyes.

This story was originally published March 28, 2019 at 12:56 PM with the headline "‘The Aftermath’ is a gorgeous wartime romance with little heat."