"After a Movie" is a poem that seeks to capture the thoughts and emotions that sometimes accompany a person as they emerge from the experience of suspending their disbelief in an absorbing film. At its best, cinema offers a transcendent experience for the viewer, blurring the line between reality and fantasy. The poem focuses on the ephemeral moments a viewer experiences during the transition back to real life, relishing them until they explode into the moment of re-entry that the poem's speaker describes as when "a room bursts into clarity and light falls on all things."

A strong metaphor and image in the poem that describes the emergence from the world of the film into real life is the sensation of being underwater, able to see the streambed below and ripples of the surface above. The immersion into the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that the film has created is like, the speaker suggests, the sensation of being underwater, drifting effortlessly along in a current. The suspension is pleasurable; the speaker describes it as being outside oneself but safely and with the knowledge that it is a temporary state of being.

"After a Movie" is an homage to the transcendent power of film and to the magical spell it can create for those willing to let themselves be transported.