This is another bit of very early news to put into the “We’ll keep an eye on it” category.
Natalia Reyes, known to fans of the post-apocalyptic genre as Dani Ramos in Terminator: Dark Fate, is set to return to the apocalypse as production begins on Tomorrow Before After.
As usual, the official plotline raises more questions than it answers:
The film centers on a woman with no name (played by Reyes) who struggles to survive on her own in a post-apocalyptic world, searching for others, with only a stray dog by her side.
In her quest, she collides with a world that is collapsed and utterly destroyed, and it seems, for a long time, that she is the only survivor in the world—until she discovers one day that she is pregnant. Not understanding how this could be possible, she then begins to question her own existence.
So, let’s start the guessing game and break that down a bit.
Reyes plays a character who thinks she’s alone. That part makes you think of films like The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, or The Quiet Earth (which is actually an unofficial remake of the former).
But in both of those films, there was no obvious apocalypse. The characters simply found themselves alone. But the blurb says that she is in an utterly destroyed world, so does that mean she was the sole survivor of a war, or maybe an astronomical impact of some sort? But how likely is it that just one person survives that kind of cataclysm? (Unless maybe they’re hiding out in a bank vault.)
So somehow, she’s alone after a devastating apocalypse of some sort, with a stray dog to keep her company. Our Puppers of the Apocalypse article lists a number of films or stories her faithful companion could be an homage to. I really hope the dog fares better at the end of the movie than some of the dogs on our list did.
But then the whopper in the plotline is that she discovers she is pregnant, and doesn’t understand how it could have happened. Unless her sex ed teacher was sorely incompetent, that means that it happened after the apocalypse while she thinks she’s alone.
There are many possibilities, but two thoughts come to mind that would take the movie in very different directions. If it was an immaculate conception, then maybe there are some metaphysical aspects going on. Maybe she’s dead in a purgatory of sorts, or just fantasizing about what her life could have been as she’s dying, a la “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. That would also jibe with the fact that it’s unlikely she really is the sole survivor of an apocalypse.
But on the other hand, assuming the film has no supernatural elements, then who impregnated her? Maybe alien experimentation? But for what purpose, and why just her?
Or could it be a Vanilla Sky or The Matrix situation where she’s actually in a simulation of some kind? Perhaps asleep in a pod somewhere, while her mind takes her on adventures through the apocalypse? That would remove any supernatural elements, and keep it strictly sci-fi, but also open many different avenues for the story to explore.
Of course, this is all 100% speculation, with no evidence to support any of the suppositions. Tomorrow Before After is set to begin production in Columbia this month, so it will likely be 2022 before we get any firm answers.
But the teaser has us interested enough that we’ll definitely keep an eye on the project and will pass along any new information as we get it.
