‘After Hours’: Martin Scorsese’s Cult Classic Turns 40

Once, a famous filmmaker told me that the movies we fall in love with at sixteen or seventeen mark us for life, and that everything we do afterward is just comparing the rest to them. For some reason, twenty-five years after that interview, that phrase still echoes in my mind as an absolute truth, however impossible to prove. Teenage cinephile obsessions become a foundation, a benchmark against which everything else will be measured. The history of one’s cinematic life isn’t something deliberate or calculated; it’s often purely accidental. A film seen at a certain moment, for some reason, can become pivotal. It doesn’t have to be the director’s best work, or even a masterpiece. It’s a personal moment in which something lodges in your memory. And it stays there forever.

Those of us who began developing our cinephile—and musical—habits in the mid-1980s had to navigate a particularly difficult moment in popular culture. Looking back, the great filmmakers were often going through rough patches—trying to adjust to a corporate Hollywood after the abrupt end of the creative freedom of the ’70s—and the same could be said for the great musicians of the previous decade. But at sixteen or seventeen, you had no way to contextualize any of that. It was simply what was there. And without the instant access to pop culture history that we have today, the present was everything.

After Hours occupies that space in my mind. It’s not the only movie that lives in that stubborn corner of memory (Paris, Texas is another), but it’s one that defines a gateway: to cinephilia, to a director’s career, to an obsession with a city. Seen today, it’s hardly Scorsese’s best work, but somehow it functions as a nostalgic reference to a very different cinema, a very different neighborhood, and, above all, a very different version of myself. Watching it again, you can notice problems, flaws, and inconsistencies—but there’s something in the connection you have with it that goes beyond explanation or analysis. It’s an affective bond, a recognition of its significance in your life.

I didn’t know it at the time, but in 1985 Martin Scorsese was in a strange pause in his career. He had just made Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, two masterpieces that consolidated his critical reputation but were not commercial hits. His ambitious attempt to adapt The Last Temptation of Christ had floundered amid religious controversy, budget cuts, and studio disinterest. For the first time since the ’70s, Scorsese seemed adrift personally and professionally. And it was in this context that After Hours appeared: a small film, with a very modest budget and an unassuming cast, destined to become, if not a commercial success, at least an unexpected creative revival.

The screenplay by Joseph Minion had circulated in Hollywood for some time as a true oddity that no one seemed willing to tackle: a darkly comic story about the nocturnal odyssey of a gray office worker, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), who decides to cross Manhattan to meet a woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in Soho. What begins as a casual date quickly escalates into a series of accidents, misunderstandings, and increasingly absurd encounters. The narrative has the structure of a nightmare: the more Paul tries to escape, the more he becomes entangled in a labyrinthine plot, spinning in ever more Dantean circles. Scorsese took this material and transformed it into a vertiginous, stylized journey. In his hands, After Hours feels more like existential horror than absurdist comedy.

A chaotic, fast-moving taxi ride begins a whirlwind of accidents and frustrations. His lone twenty-dollar bill flies out of a taxi, his encounter with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), an eccentric artist working in a loft on the corner of Howard & Crosby St., disorients him, and when he reunites with Marcy, he realizes she is somewhat different—emotionally and physically—from the person he expected. His cruel exit from this uncomfortable situation sets off a chaotic path that only grows more complicated as the hours pass. In this sense, Paul’s increasingly troubled night can be read as a symbolic punishment for his selfish and clumsy behavior toward her. His abrupt departure is not gratuitous: each subsequent encounter confronts him with situations that are progressively absurd, hostile, or humiliating, as if the city itself were an invisible tribunal.

The logic of the film is a kind of urban purgatory: Paul is subjected to trials that reflect his flaws, fears, and inability to connect with others. The punishment is not physical, but psychological, absurd, and proportionate to his errors. This type of ironic, Kafkaesque poetic justice connects the film to other Scorsese works, where characters attempt to escape moral dead-ends without achieving the satisfaction they seek. Like the protagonists of Goodfellas or Casino, Paul manages to survive his nightmarish journey, but the doorway he finds upon stepping into the light offers no real resolution. Returning home—citing The Wizard of Oz, which Marcy references—is not the solution to his problems.

Paul’s ordeal never follows realistic logic but a purely symbolic one. He can’t ride the subway because he lacks a few cents, and the clerk refuses to let him pass for fear of losing his job (“I could go to a party, get drunk, talk to someone, who knows?” he says); he asks for money in a bar and the till doesn’t work; he enters an apartment and causes an accident; he is mistaken for a prowler; he is threatened with a mohawk haircut at a party. Every attempt to “go home” is futile: he seems trapped in an open-air prison populated by characters who, for him—a seemingly conventional office worker—embody the height of eccentricity. In this, Scorsese appears to identify with Paul’s paranoia and clumsiness: the Little Italy guy who wandered into Soho once and found himself overwhelmed by what he saw.

Watching the film today, another value emerges: the depiction of mid-1980s New York, specifically a Soho that was still a neighborhood of bohemian artists, large peeling-wall lofts, and dark bars—far from the district of boutiques, specialty cafés, and galleries it would become. Scorsese captured a nocturnal, humid, dangerous, and nearly empty city, where every corner could conceal a threat. Perhaps not the dense Times Square of Taxi Driver or the mob-filled Lower East Side of Mean Streets, but still a place of menace: even avant-garde artists, gay couples, and solitary figures seem, to Paul, an organized throng out to end him.

Scorsese worked here with Michael Ballhaus, the German cinematographer and longtime collaborator of Rainer W. Fassbinder, who would go on to play a key role in several of his later films. Ballhaus’s experience with limited budgets allowed the camera to become a character itself: zigzagging through hallways, plunging into subjective shots, and trailing Paul with an anxiety that translates his neurosis and paranoia into images. This “fast, electric” style, as Scorsese described it, would mark his work for the rest of his career, particularly in Goodfellas, with its frantic zooms and constant pans.

After Hours was met with critical acclaim. Roger Ebert called it “one of those movies where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, where every door opens to a new level of nightmare.” Pauline Kael highlighted its “comic cruelty” and compared it to the works of Franz Kafka and Luis Buñuel. At the Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese received the Best Director award for the film. At the box office, however, results were modest: it earned about $10 million in the United States, just above its budget. Still, even without massive commercial success, it became the closest thing the New York filmmaker has made to a cult film.

Forty years on, After Hours remains a defiant genre-bender: too absurd to be a thriller, too dark to be a comedy, too experimental to be mere entertainment, and too Scorsese to allow simple identification with its protagonist. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes it fascinating. Watching it today is a dual experience: a trip into the urban anxiety of the ’80s, and a reminder of how an era fades to give way to another. That part of Manhattan no longer hosts the abandoned warehouses of 1985; Scorsese is no longer the hesitant, crisis-stricken filmmaker of the time; and forty years later, one is still trying to escape those dark alleys without fully succeeding. Ultimately, we live forever in the films that shaped us.