Earthquakes, Escaped Convicts, and Existential Regret
There are disaster movies, there are horror movies, and then there’s Aftershock—a cinematic mashup so tone-deaf it makes Sharknado look like Schindler’s List. Directed by Nicolás López and co-written by Eli Roth, this Chilean-American “disaster horror” promises chaos, carnage, and cultural commentary. What it delivers instead is a ninety-minute endurance test that feels like being trapped in rubble with a group of people you already hated before the quake hit.
This is the kind of movie that doesn’t just depict an apocalypse—it is one.
The Set-Up: White Guy Lost in Translation
Eli Roth stars as Gringo, an American tourist in Chile. He’s not a hero, not a villain, not even a compelling idiot—just a dude whose main traits are “awkward foreigner” and “plot magnet for disaster.” He teams up with two locals, Ariel and Pollo, whose names sound like a breakfast combo at Denny’s. Together, they hit the club scene with three European women who appear to be on a gap year between bad decisions.
The group parties, drinks, and dances their way through Chile’s nightlife until Mother Nature decides she’s had enough of their vacation Instagram stories. The earthquake hits, and suddenly everyone’s priorities shift from partying to surviving. Except the film’s script, which stays drunk the entire time.
The Quake: Special Effects by the Department of Trembling Cameras
When the earthquake finally hits, the audience is treated to what can only be described as a visual migraine. The camera shakes like it’s attached to a blender, extras run around screaming, and chunks of CGI rubble fly through the air with all the weight of a PowerPoint animation.
In theory, it’s chaos. In execution, it’s confusing. One moment, someone’s trapped under debris; the next, they’re fine; the next, they’ve lost a limb. It’s like the movie’s continuity got crushed in the quake too.
Ariel gets his hand crushed helping someone, which is tragic until you realize he’s the only person in the film with a moral compass, and therefore marked for death. He doesn’t make it long. No one does.
After the Aftershock: Things Get Worse (and Dumber)
Escaping the club turns out to be the easy part. Once the group reaches the surface, they’re faced with the real horror: the screenplay.
First, they lose their car. Then, their friend. Then, all sense of narrative structure. The group stumbles from one disaster to another—earthquake rubble, looters, escaped prisoners, fire trucks, tsunamis—like a video game where the player keeps walking into increasingly stupid levels.
You know things have gone off the rails when a tsunami warning feels like the least absurd thing happening.
At one point, a tram cable snaps, sending an entire group of survivors to their deaths. It’s meant to be a gut-punch moment, but by then you’re so numb to tragedy that you just nod and think, “Yup, seems about right.”
The Villains: Humanity, but Make It Cartoonishly Evil
Because the movie apparently didn’t think a massive earthquake was scary enough, it throws in escaped prisoners as secondary antagonists. These men are not just dangerous—they’re walking, drooling caricatures of depravity. Their hobbies include murder, rape, and ruining the film’s already fragile tone.
It’s not tension; it’s exploitation.
One of the prisoners assaults Irina (Natasha Yarovenko) in a scene that’s meant to shock but instead feels grossly gratuitous, like the filmmakers mistook cruelty for realism. It’s a pattern that defines the whole movie—every chance to explore human fear or morality gets replaced by cheap violence and bad taste.
Even the few moments of heroism are undermined by the script’s gleeful nihilism. Whenever someone tries to do the right thing, the universe rewards them with immediate and gruesome death.
It’s like Final Destination, except the destination is just a pile of bad decisions.
The Tone: Somewhere Between Hangover and Horror Show
Aftershock can’t decide what it wants to be. The first half plays like a travel vlog hosted by frat boys, complete with jokes about partying and women. The second half wants to be a gritty survival story. The result is tonal whiplash so severe it could qualify as a workplace injury.
You go from slow-motion bottle service to mass death in under fifteen minutes. It’s like someone mashed up The Hangover with The Road and forgot to tell the actors which movie they were in.
Roth, who co-wrote the script, clearly thinks he’s crafting something deep and shocking about human nature under pressure. Instead, it feels like an edgy college film project made by someone who just discovered cynicism and Red Bull at the same time.
The Characters: A Disaster Within the Disaster
The ensemble cast is made up of people you wouldn’t want to sit next to on a plane, let alone survive an earthquake with.
Gringo is supposed to be relatable, but he’s basically the cinematic equivalent of a lost fanny pack. Ariel is noble but short-lived. Pollo oscillates between comic relief and tragic fodder. The women—Monica, Kylie, and Irina—are written with all the nuance of cardboard cutouts labeled “Love Interest,” “Sister,” and “Victim.”
By the time the tsunami arrives, you’re not hoping anyone survives—you’re hoping the ocean has the good sense to end the movie.
The Cinematic Irony: Eli Roth Drowns in His Own Edginess
Eli Roth has built a career on shock value, from Cabin Fever to Hostel. But Aftershock marks the point where his brand of nihilistic sadism officially collapses under its own weight.
There’s a fine line between “bleak realism” and “utter misanthropy,” and Roth crosses it with the enthusiasm of a frat boy charging through a haunted house. His character’s eventual fate—burned alive, screaming—is not so much tragic as poetic justice for making us sit through this.
The film seems desperate to say something about how fragile civilization is, how quickly people turn savage when systems break down. Unfortunately, it delivers that message with all the subtlety of a falling building.
The Ending: Washed Up, Literally and Figuratively
After ninety minutes of chaos, only Monica (Andrea Osvárt) remains. She drags herself through tunnels, past corpses, and into daylight. Finally, a moment of peace!
Then she looks up and sees a tsunami racing toward her.
Roll credits.
It’s the kind of ending that wants to be profound—a statement on futility and fate—but mostly feels like the filmmakers realized they didn’t know how to end it, so they just killed everyone again.
It’s less “existential tragedy” and more “we ran out of money for dialogue.”
The Real Aftershock: You Paid to Watch This
Watching Aftershock is an exercise in emotional erosion. It starts mildly annoying and ends spiritually exhausting. There’s no catharsis, no insight, just an escalating sequence of misery that mistakes suffering for storytelling.
It’s a movie that wants to say, “Humans are the real monsters,” but all it really proves is that bad screenwriting is indestructible.
Even the earthquake looks like it’s trying to leave the movie halfway through.
Final Verdict: Disaster Tourism in Movie Form
Aftershock is a film that somehow manages to make mass destruction boring. It’s mean-spirited, sloppy, and self-important—a travelogue of torment where the scenery collapses and the humanity disappears faster than the box office returns.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: never go clubbing with Eli Roth. Or at least, never follow him underground.
Verdict: ★☆☆☆☆
A cinematic fault line of bad taste, Aftershock shakes, rattles, and rolls its way to oblivion. It’s not just a disaster movie—it’s a disaster of a movie. The only true horror here is realizing that, yes, someone greenlit this.
