The story begins with the return of Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop) to his hometown in rural Poland after having lived in Chicago for two decades.

He learns that his brother Józef (Maciej Stuhr) is shunned by the community for acquiring and displaying on his farmland dozens of Jewish tombstones which he discovered had been used by German occupying forces as paving stones in a now abandoned road.

After learning that their own father was directly involved in the murder of the Jews who were burned to death in the family's former house, the brothers' roles are reversed.

But he is returned to the village by a hospital nurse/doctor—the daughter of one of the oldest surviving neighbors who had known the truth but kept it secret—only to see his brother Józef beaten, stabbed, and then nailed high on the inside of the barn door, his arms outstretched.

The movie ends with a scene of a group of young and older Israeli Jews being led by an Orthodox Rabbi reciting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead, in front of a formal memorial stone, at the now restored cemetery in the area of the stones that Józef had placed in his fields, while Franciszek watches with respect, lights a candle, leaves it on one of the tombstones and nodding slightly to the scene, turns and walks away.

The inspiration for Pasikowski to write and direct the film, which was originally titled Kaddish (the Jewish prayer read by those in mourning),[6][7] was the controversy in Poland surrounding the 2000 publication of Neighbors by Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross.

Wprost, one of Poland's largest weekly, ran a cover with Stuhr's image framed in a Jewish star, accompanied by the headline, "Maciej Stuhr—Was He Lynched at His Own Request?

The website's consensus states: "It represents an occasionally uneven collision of genres, but all in all, Wladyslaw Pasikowski's Aftermath delves into Holocaust guilt with power and efficiency.