Whatever, Ever After (2025) | Film Review

Whatever Ever After

Over the past fifteen years, David Skato has been steadily sharpening his craft. When he's not writing, he's filming; when he's not filming, he's producing music, and when he's not immersed in sound, he's out building connections. Skato is a creative in constant motion, and with each production his technical finesse and storytelling grow more refined. That brings us to Skato’s latest production - Whatever Ever After. From the outset, it is clear just how much love and care has been poured into this film.

James Brown once sang:

“This is a man's world, this is a man's world
But it wouldn't, it wouldn't be nothing
Nothing, without a woman or a girl”

Only this isn’t just any man’s world it’s Skato’s …

Caution Spoilers.

Whatever Ever After | The Script

With Whatever Ever After, David Skato dares to ask the radical question..
What happens if Man becomes Woman and Woman becomes Man?

He doesn’t ease us into this either, within the first 10 minutes, we meet a group of young men, each given a personality trait of bitterness, suspicion, and outright disdain for woman.

One declares ‘’No woman can be faithful’’ - a line so full of resentment it shows the fear these men have of women. In most films, such cynicism is spoken by the woman and aimed squarely at men. This is Skato disrupting the norm, and challenging assumptions about love and loyalty within normal gender roles. This is a rhythm that continues throughout Whatever Ever After.

Just as we’re ready to write these men off as insufferable humans who desperately need a crash course in the ‘Me-Too Movement’, ‘The Event’ happens , It’s a move pulled straight from the Marvel playbook, unapologetically genre-bending and brazen in scope. Skato doesn’t just flip the script; he rewires it, opening a view to a world where personality and identity are suddenly unfixed, fluid, and ripe for re-examination. Overnight people wake with the same mind, but their bodies have changed sex, men and women are now swapped.

Skato is not afraid to play into the ludicrousness of the situation and introduces levity into the men/women’s trauma. As men now living as women, stumble through daily life, and try to understand they no longer have an appendage dangling between their legs, Skato writes some genuinely funny scenes as the men who are now women and the women who are men, navigate their way around the new world order.

I was starting to become invested in the comedy drama that was unfolding, thinking this is Skato’s ‘Freaky Friday’. Yes, some scenes flirt with female clichés, like the early moment where a newly transformed man experiences menstruation for the first time, prompting a frantic search for sanitary products (I wonder how much input the female cast members had?). As time unfolds, Skato moves away from the obvious and delves deeper into the questions that arise.

Women become husbands and CEOs with an agenda; men navigate motherhood, face sexual assault, and confront intimacy from an unfamiliar vantage point. It’s occasionally disorienting, and quite provocative.

It is interesting to note that those women I mentioned earlier (the ones not trusted by men) are still the same person inside (now they are men), so sex does not matter to personality. As the film goes on, some characters are more accepting of their new identity than others and adjust better. Skato plays with the concept that personality is not dependent on the body you are born with.

While watching the film, a Dua Lipa lyric crashed into my mid, ‘Boys will be boys, but girls will be women’, the lyric lands like a thesis statement—one that Skato seems to wrestle with, challenge, and ultimately reimagine.

But it is not all rosy in this Whatever Ever After world. Thematically, Skato is leading us down one direction, only to suddenly pivot, I guess there is only so far you can stretch the novelty of men experiencing womanhood and vice versa, before it is time to move the narrative on.

As the plot juggles various storylines - children being cared for by men-turned-women and domestic routines performed by women-turned-men, the storyline starts to get complicated, with four protagonists and their partners, that is least eight characters, each with their own substory. We the audience have to mentally reconcile that the woman onscreen is, in fact, a man. For a two-hour runtime, this middle section becomes a bit difficult to keep up with, losing some of the emotional momentum and the aforementioned comedy in the process.

Another Question Is Asked..

Amid the chaos of all the shifting identities, Skato attempts to narrow the storyline threading in a subtler, surprisingly tender subplot: a romance between one of the original group, a woman (ex-man) and a man (ex-woman). It’s a narrative loaded with complexity. Not only must we the audience recalibrate our understanding of who these characters are, but Skato introduces another question...

What does genuine connection look like when traditional gender roles are blurred?

Through awkward dates, vulnerable conversations, and moments of true recognition, (some, I am told, are based on real life experiences), Skato takes us though not just bodily transformation, but emotional confusion and how childhood experiences that shape our adult life.

It has to be said that whilst all of this character development is going on, Skato moves the story forward via a mix of time jumps and background explanations via breaking news shown in the back of scenes. It’s a fast way of pushing the story forward and explaining to us the audience what is happening with ‘The Event’ without over exposition- a simple idea well implemented.

The final third of the film sees Skato shift tone again, ignorance, whimsy and confusion gives way to trauma. In every sense, Whatever Ever After, becomes Skato’s Shakespearean tragedy. The final scenes reminding me strongly of another Indie Film I have reviewed ‘ Robbie Walsh’s The Letters (go search it out!) It’s in this last section of the film that we see some confusing scenes, one woman gatecrashes a baptism taking place on a beach, I know what Skato was getting at, but it’s a scene that feels a bit out of place to me.

Whatever Ever After | Casting

I have never seen a Skato film that is badly cast, and it is safe to say that Whatever Ever After does not break this run.

Terrance Carty, Greg Mathis Jr., Tae, Marcus Brodie play the young men with questionable ethics so well, they really are hateful, but they are out played by the women who follow.

Stand Out Performances are:

Cree Armstead as Nia

Crayton Michelle Cambridge plays Jordan

Crayton Michelle Cambridge brings a quiet strength to the role of Jordan, serving as the emotional support in a film brimming with transformation and turmoil. While Nia’s journey is marked by volatility and self-discovery, Jordan offers a stabilising presence. This means that Cambridge does not need big speeches or dramatic flourishes. She communicates with a glance, a pause, a perfectly timed eyebrow raise. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you of Suits’ Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres)—always in the room, always essential but never over acted.

B.J. Minor plays Joaquin

Joaquin is a sensitive character that becomes a strong emotional support to Nia. Its a character that doesn't scream, shout and has emotive stories to tell. Skato has found the perfect actor in B.J Minor to play Joaquin. When emotion is called for it is believable, delivered in a calm measured way. Providing understated gravitas to the personal stories being told. Every word spoken seems intentional and accompanied with appropriate body language and facial expressions. It is a softness that holds weight and in a story that dances between fantasy and grounded reality, Minor becomes the thread that keeps it tethered.

Cree is a classically trained actor with a background in dance and theatre, and her role in this film is one of her most emotionally demanding to date. Playing Nia, a woman who was once a man, Cree has to handle a character arc so intense that every scene holds some emotional strain. Skato doesn’t let her relax, he throws Nia into a whirlwind of identity shifts and life stages, all whilst playing a woman who was once a man. This would be testing for any actor. Cree delivers on every level implementing a wide range of acting skills from physical nuance, to raw vulnerability to bring Nia to life

Sound, Music and Score

First off, this is hands-down one of the best-sounding Skato productions to date.

Two things stand out: the actors’ voices are crystal clear (no muffled mumbling or echoey dialogue here), which suggests Skato brought in some seasoned sound engineers who know their way around a boom mic, and then there is the music. Yes, there’s a sprinkle of stock tracks lurking in the background, but the real surprise is Skato’s original score written, produced, and released as a full album. It’s so slickly produced you’d swear it came out of a Nashville studio. A standout track for me is
'Double Up Triple Down'. It’s got the kind of cinematic style that would feel right at home on the ‘Twisters’ soundtrack, (one of my favourite recent movie albums btw) It's a style that is on trend, and should be released as a single!

“I doubled up on dreams, tripled down on pain—still came out shining in the pouring rain.”

Cinematography

Hyunjun Park is a talented cinematographer originally from Seoul, South Korea, now based in Los Angeles. His portfolio spans films, fashion work, commercials, and docu-style productions, all unified by Park’s keen eye for lighting aesthetics and a willingness to experiment with camera movement.

Park is exactly the cinematographer David Skato needed for this production. Crucially, he is not the type to default to a single shot style or static setups. Each scene is approached with variety. It is good to see that Park is not afraid to roam with the camera gliding between actors as they deliver lines, blending intimate close ups with expansive wide shots. This fluidity injects energy into the performances and lends the film a far more polished, dare I say it … cinematic look than its budget might suggest. A win for Skato.

Whilst Park is a major step up for a Skato production, visually there are still some clues that his film has an indie budget. Most overt is the use of hi-resolution stock footage such as city scenes or the opening drone shot. This footage is notably sharper than the rest of the film, and this can be jarring to the viewer. Whilst there are attempts at some colour grading, it does not quite eliminate the contrast between the footage.

Overall thoughts

Watching Whatever Ever After is an emotional experience, it demands concentration from the viewer. It is a film that asks a lot of questions about gender, sex and identity and leaves several unanswered. ‘The Event’ never gets challenged or explained, what happens when babies are born? What happens if ‘The Event’ reverts?

At the end though I wonder if those questions really matter?

Whatever Ever After is the movie equivalent of Beyoncé’s If I Were a Boy. In that song Beyoncé sang:

‘’If I were a boy,
I think I could understand,
How it feels to love a girl,
I swear I'd be a better man’’

That’s exactly where Skato takes us, The misogynistic men we meet at the start of the film, get to understand what it takes to be a woman.

The Silver Hedgehog Rating is Recommended

The Silver Hedgehog Rating: 4.3 'Recommended'

The Script / Screenplay
🦔🦔🦔🦔
Casting

🦔🦔🦔🦔🦔

Sound Quality

🦔🦔🦔🦔

Cinematography

🦔🦔🦔🦔

Whatever Ever After, becomes Skato’s Shakespearean tragedy.

Words Garry
Editor JJ
Images David Skato Productions

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