The Afterparty, review: thumpingly awful comedy whodunit feels like a bad hangover

You wake up covered in vomit, with a thumping headache and a vague sense of regret. If the creators behind booze-fuelled whodunit The Afterparty (Apple TV+) wanted to simulate the effects of a brutal hangover, they nailed the brief. Unfortunately, it makes for a distinctly unpleasant viewing experience.

Alas, this isn’t the future of avant garde film-making, it’s just really bad comedy – the kind that makes you wonder whether you’ll ever laugh again or perhaps consider a move into violent crime. And yet, confoundingly, all the raw materials are there for something great.

Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the duo behind off-beat comedy hits The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, are given a cast of bankable stars and gifted comic actors, along with the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster. But between the artificially elaborate plot and tedious special effects, it seems they forgot to write any jokes.

Following a high school reunion, pop star and professional narcissist Xavier (Dave Franco) invites his old classmates to a lavish after-party at his futuristic cliffside mansion. At the end of the night – leaving a trail of possible motives behind him – the shirtless poser takes a fatal tumble onto the rocks below.

Cue the arrival of Tiffany Haddish as hapless Detective Danner and her partner, Detective Culp (John Early), who share the explosive chemistry of a damp cloth. They resolve to unmask the culprit before anyone can knock them off the case, hence our familiar mise-en-scène: a bunch of oddballs locked in a house until one of them confesses.

Each episode follows a different suspect as they recount their movements on the night of the murder, with each story half-heartedly parodying a different film genre, starting with romcom. Prime suspect Aniq (Sam Richardson) is a hopeless romantic who meets-cute with high school crush Zoe (Zo? Chao). Their relationship blossoms over a series of cheesy montages and a rain-soaked confession of love on the bleachers, before Xavier tricks her into his helicopter like a randy Bond villain.

It’s an uninspiring premise executed with brusque, joyless precision. The comparison with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is an obvious and unflattering one. Where Johnson interprets the murder mystery genre with bracing wit and style, The Afterparty treats it with navel-gazing contempt, resorting to Fast and Furious-style car chases and Broadway musical parodies to avoid the agricultural work of plot development.

In terms of comedy, everything seems contrived to produce the perfect reaction gif or clippable social media post – some memeable hinterland – rather than contribute to a coherent comic style. Danner makes sure to “grab [her] popcorn”; Xavier boorishly insists “I’m a feminist!”; Zoe dryly references her “all-bread diet”. These jokes don’t add up to anything in terms of character or plot, but rather participate in the sardonic grammar of social media to give the impression of humour.

Perhaps epitomising the missed opportunities at play, Stath Lets Flats’ Jamie Demetriou – an effortless comic actor – makes an unexpected appearance as the nerdy Walt, but is bizarrely denied any time or space to actually be funny.

Confidently billed by Apple TV+ as “genre-defying”, The Afterparty ends up in a void of its own: neither funny nor gripping, intriguing nor moving. The killer’s identity a vanishing point of interest amid the fiddly code-switching. The result is a surprisingly boring fever dream with glossy production values. If this is the future of television, pass me the bottle.