Can an ordinary office employee, with a pretty boring daily life, be involved in the murder of a blond lady, a strange art business and burglaries in a neighborhood, all in the same night? 

The answer is yes, but only if that’s happening in New York. 
New York is the driving force of the action of “After Hours” by Martin Scorsese.  
New York, the city that never sleeps, the city where anything can happen. It becomes the puppet master pulling the strings a bit too hard of its own inhabitants. 

Since the very first scene of the movie we find out that the city’s target of the night is Paul, an ordinary man that just wants to enjoy his coffe with a book after a long day in his office. Unfortunately, te city has other plans for him, which are many sketchy encounters in the houses of bizarre people around Soho. 
In the beginning, Paul is intrigued by the meeting with a very charming girl that invites him to her place, in the big house of an artist friend. But we soon realise that there’s something off and scary about all the dynamics that are going on.  

That’s when the whole story becomes a never ending bad dream in which Paul keeps trying to get back home, but he can’t because he’s constantly forced to face new situations that lead him further and further from his house. It turns into a psychological thriller in which we fear the possibility of crazy things happening to him. We can relate to him as viewers, it had happened to all of us to have one of those dreams in which you’re trying to do something, but there’s something else blocking you.  

That’s why it’s amusingly painful to watch, because we become Paul fighting for his goal against the craziness of New York during the night. 
The peak of all Paul’s fears is when he’s captured inside of a papier-maché sculpture. Not only he can’t go home, but he can’t even move his body at all because of that. 

But like all dreams, it has to come to an end. As a metaphor of it, Paul manages to break and to escape from the sculpture that was locking him inside of his hell made up by weirdly connected ugly situations around New York.