Normality is a fortress with papier-mâché walls. All it takes is an unexpected gust of wind—a twenty-dollar bill flying out of a taxi window, for example—to see it crumple and reveal the primordial chaos it masks. Paul Hackett, a word processor by profession (a job description that already smacks of 1980s obsolescence and dehumanization), is the unwitting guardian of one such fortress. His world is the predictability of Midtown Manhattan, a grid of logic and routine. But one evening, seduced by the promise of a meeting with a mysterious girl named Marcy, he makes the fatal mistake: he crosses the Rubicon of Canal Street and enters SoHo. After midnight, SoHo ceases to be a neighborhood and becomes a state of mind, a Kafkaesque labyrinth designed by an Escher on amphetamines.

Paul Hackett's journey in "After Hours" is not a simple urban misadventure; it is a descent into a circle of hell whose architecture is the absurd. Martin Scorsese, fresh from the colossal and frustrating shipwreck of his first attempt to bring “The Last Temptation of Christ” to the screen, pours all his neurosis, frustration, and creative energy into this “minor” film, which, unable to explode into a biblical epic, implodes into a black comedy as tense as a violin string. The result is one of the purest, most concentrated, and formally perfect works of his canon. It is Scorsese directing as if he were defusing a bomb, with editor Thelma Schoonmaker cutting each scene with the precision of a feverish heart surgeon.

The most immediate, almost didactic parallel is with Franz Kafka. Paul is a Josef K. of the yuppie era, guilty of a crime he does not know—perhaps that of desiring to break out of his predetermined grid—and condemned to a trial without a court, whose evidence is a series of malevolent coincidences and unbalanced characters. Every attempt to restore order, to take logical action (take the subway, call a taxi, ask for help), is systematically thwarted by a universe that has suspended its own physical and moral laws. But while Kafka orchestrated a parable about the inevitability of bureaucracy and existential guilt, Scorsese stages a more visceral, almost slapstick nightmare. It is terror that makes you laugh, a laugh choked by panic.

"After Hours" could also be read as a perverse modern Odyssey. Paul is an Ulysses without cunning, whose only desperate goal is to return to Ithaca (his anonymous uptown apartment). SoHo is his Mediterranean Sea dotted with treacherous islands, and the women he meets are his sirens, his Circes, his Calypsos. There is Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), a neurotic nymph whose surreal stories of rape and burns make her as attractive as she is repulsive; there is Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a dominatrix sculptor who practices sadomasochistic art and treats Paul like raw material; there is Julie (Teri Garr), a ditzy waitress trapped in a behavioral loop from a 1950s sitcom; and there is Gail (Catherine O'Hara), an ice cream truck driver who leads an angry mob in pursuit of the alleged “thief.” Each of them represents a form of seduction that turns into a trap, a haven that turns out to be a whirlpool. In this sense, the film is a profound, almost Freudian exploration of male castration anxiety. Paul is gradually stripped of every symbol of power and virility: his money, his identity (he is mistaken for a thief), his mobility, and finally his very subjectivity, until he literally becomes an art object.

Joseph Minion's screenplay, written as a thesis for Columbia University's film school, is a clockwork device of diabolical perfection. Every seemingly random element introduced in the first half hour—the plaster sculptures, the front door keys, Marcy's scar, the mohawk of a punk at Club Berlin—returns later as a piece of the crazy puzzle, a weapon pointed at our protagonist. It's a domino structure where each falling tile triggers a catastrophe greater and more absurd than the previous one. Michael Ballhaus's fluid and nervous camera follows Paul like a predator, trapping him in claustrophobic shots and following him in frenetic tracking shots that amplify his state of perpetual panic. The soundtrack, which alternates between Howard Shore's anxiety-inducing scores and the ironic counterpoint of Bach's “Air on the G String,” creates an emotional short circuit that is the stylistic hallmark of the film.

Contextualizing "After Hours" is essential to understanding its genius. It is the mid-1980s, the height of the Reagan era. The yuppie, with his faith in capital and social order, was the new American hero. Scorsese takes this archetype and throws it into the bohemian and underground cauldron of SoHo, a pre-gentrification world that, in the eyes of a conformist like Paul, appears to be an alien planet populated by penniless artists, nihilistic punks, and small-time criminals. The film thus also becomes a fierce social satire: the clash between two Americas, the glossy and rampant Wall Street and the nocturnal, chaotic and creative one that lives on its margins. Paul is not punished because he is a bad person, but because he is an existential tourist, an intruder who does not understand the rules of the game and whose only currency – money – suddenly becomes useless.

The climax of this odyssey of the absurd is Paul's final transformation. Hunted by an angry mob that embodies collective irrationality (a theme dear to Fritz Lang), he finds refuge in the basement of another sculptor, June, the only vaguely maternal and protective figure in the film. To save him, she covers him in plaster, transforming him into a screaming sculpture reminiscent of Munch's “The Scream.” It is the total annihilation of the self, the literal petrification of his anguish. But the cosmic retribution is not over yet. The real thieves steal the “statue” and, during their escape, lose it from the van. In a final, mocking twist of fate, Paul shatters on the pavement right in front of his office, at the dawn of a new working day. He gets up, covered in chalk dust, shakes off the remains of his cocoon and, like an automaton, enters the building to start another day.

It is not a happy ending. It is a loop, an eternal return to the same worthy of Nietzsche. The nightmare has taught Paul nothing, it has not made him wiser or stronger. It has simply chewed him up and spat him out at the exact point where he started. Chaos has not been defeated, it has only been temporarily stemmed by sunlight and the routine of work. The fortress of normality has been rebuilt, as fragile as before, waiting for the next gust of wind. In this, "After Hours" transcends its era and becomes a timeless parable about the precariousness of our constructed reality, a brilliant and terrifying reminder that a small, insignificant miscalculation is enough to plunge us out of time, into that dark territory where logic sleeps and monsters come to play. A minor masterpiece only in size, but immense in its density and perfection.