After Impact Review: Rensen's Somber Bunker Sci-Fi

Ethan Nichols (Rensen) has barely buried his father when he inherits one of the largest greenhouses in the country. It is, on paper, a fortune. In practice, it is a farm at the precise moment an asteroid makes landfall a foregone conclusion. As supply chains cough and die, Ethan's world narrows to betrayal, isolation, and the creeping suspicion that the price of living through this might be the last recognizable piece of himself.

He retreats to the family bunker, where the film's second act settles into a grueling routine of injury, hunger, and grief. Then a voice crackles over the radio. Jessie (Maxie Li) is out there somewhere, and Ethan is no longer alone. The screenplay uses that static-laced connection sparingly, and Li's vocal presence lends the back half a fragile pulse the visuals sometimes lack. Jack (Riki Antonievich), Connor (Will Clague), Elle (Stephanie Ramlose), and Sophie (Lee-Ann Dirks) drift through earlier scenes as ghosts of the life Ethan loses, while James Crompton and Moehau Hodges-Tai make vivid impressions in smaller turns.

Rensen is a director with an eye for texture. The greenhouse - all wet glass and humming sodium light - becomes a character in its own right, a cathedral of doomed chlorophyll. He shoots corridors like veins and soil like sediment, and there is a genuinely haunting stretch in the second act where the film trusts silence over score. When Rensen strips the sound design down to breath and dripping water, you can feel the movie's real ambition: not spectacle, but spiritual attrition.

The problem is proportion. Ninety-five minutes is not enough room for a greenhouse empire, an asteroid threat, a betrayal subplot, a bunker survival saga, and a radio-friendship redemption arc. Characters arrive with names and backstories that the film never earns, and deaths that should devastate land with a shrug. Rensen the actor also struggles where Rensen the director succeeds; his Ethan defaults to a furrowed stoicism that flattens grief into a single note across nearly an hour of screen time. It is a performance of endurance rather than transformation, and when the script demands real cracks - a scream, a plea, a laugh - the film's temperature barely moves.

Still, credit where it's due. The final twenty minutes, built around Ethan's first contact with Jessie, achieve a strange and modest grace. The dialogue is spare, the sentiment almost earned, and the film finally locates its thesis: survival is a group project, even when your group is one voice on a dying frequency. TMDb's 4.875/10 rating suggests audiences wanted a bigger, slicker disaster movie. What they got instead is a lo-fi confession about what happens to the soul when the sky falls. That it doesn't fully work is less interesting than the fact it was attempted at all.

Pros

• Striking, tactile production design; the greenhouse and bunker feel genuinely lived-in
• Maxie Li's offscreen voice performance gives the third act an emotional anchor
• Restrained sound design and patient pacing create real dread in stretches
• The radio-contact finale lands with quiet, hard-won sincerity

Cons

• Too many plot threads crammed into 95 minutes; betrayal subplot feels rushed
• Michiel Rensen's lead turn is one-note, lacking the range the role demands
• Supporting characters arrive underdeveloped and exit without consequence
• Uneven editing undercuts tension in the middle stretch

After Impact is a flawed but fascinating swing - a bunker drama wearing the skin of a blockbuster. Rensen proves he has a real visual voice and a willingness to sit with despair rather than cut away from it, but the film's ambitions outrun its screenplay and its star. There's a better, leaner version of this movie buried somewhere in the rubble: one man, one radio, one long wait for the world to answer back. As it stands, this is an apocalypse worth a curious matinee - just don't expect the sky to open. It mostly just dims.