Freda gets involved with a young trouble-making Nazi loyalist (Jannik Schümann). Rachel does tea at a swank hotel with Susan (Kate Phillips), the wife of a boorish British officer, played by Martin Compston. The supporting characters are not terribly fresh, either. At first, she’s scolding him not to “creep about the house,” and later, well, you can figure it out. Rachel hates Stefan because he’s German, and vice versa. This exploration merely elicits unintentional laughter, especially whenever the script calls for Rachel and Stefan to get sexy. Yet, the screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse - adapting Rhidian Brook’s novel - fails to go deep in exploring the difficulties and anxieties that arise in a climate of distrust and grief. Post-war chaos is a fertile backdrop to explore marital strife. Lewis, however, decides to offer Stefan and his daughter lodging on the top floor. After the fall of the city, survivors are forced to surrender their homes to Allied officers and relocate to camps or other locations. It belongs to recent-widower Stefan Lubert (Skarsgard), an architect, and his troubled teenage daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann). They roll up to a stunning palatial estate adorned with marble statues and columns. It’s an awkward reunion, so cringe-y you wonder if the couple is really married.
The movie opens with Rachel’s arrival via train. Like the marriage of Rachel (Knightley) and Lewis (Clarke), a British colonel, it (heavy-handed metaphor alert) needs rebuilding. The city brims with crumbled buildings, burning cars and 25,000 citizens unaccounted. The setting is Hamburg, five months after the Allied victory.
Ridiculous doesn’t begin to describe James Kent’s “The Aftermath,” a post-WWII sudser about the languid affair between an English woman (Keira Knightley) and the German hunk (Alexander Skarsgard) whose home she and her emotionally vacant husband (Jason Clarke) take charge.