Aftersun, the debut feature from writer/director Charlotte Wells, is seemingly split in two. There’s the main plot: father Calum (Paul Mescal) and his daughter Sophie’s (Frankie Corio) vacation to Turkey. Then there’s an enigmatic framing device, which sees a grown-up Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) re-examining her memories of that trip.
While adult Sophie only appears in flashes throughout Aftersun, these moments lend a layer of melancholy to the vacation scenes. Instead of a linear look at a father-daughter trip, Wells turns Aftersun into an aching encapsulation of a child’s desire to truly understand their parent — and the frustration that comes with such an insurmountable task. The effective blending of the past and the future paired with Mescal and Corio’s beautifully natural performances make Aftersun a movie that will stick with you long after it’s done.
Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio go on a father-daughter holiday.
If you’re a fan of Mescal’s charming and vulnerable performance in Normal People, you will love his work in Aftersun. Playing a young father, Mescal takes on a role that is both more mature and somewhat harder to read. It’s clear that Calum loves Sophie dearly, but it’s also clear that there are parts of his life that he isn’t quite ready to share with her yet. Throughout Aftersun, Calum remains a mysterious figure, sometimes disappearing into himself or on a night walk. A scene in which Calum tells Sophie about a pivotal childhood memory sheds some light on his occasional stand-offishness, but we never learn the entire truth.
This inscrutability is by design, as the film presents Calum through Sophie’s eyes. He remains unknowable in the way that our parents and their grown-up affairs can seem unknowable at a young age. However, in Corio’s hands, it’s clear Sophie realizes something is up. She just isn’t certain what.
Aftersun is Corio’s first film role, but you wouldn’t know it from the strength of her performance. She and Mescal are perfectly matched, capturing all the complexities of Sophie and Calum’s relationship with ease. Corio in particular is tasked with anchoring many of Aftersun‘s most emotionally intense sequences, including a karaoke night that will have you curling up with anxiety. She nails every moment. Whether Sophie is tagging along with vacationing teenagers, or just wandering the resort alone, you’re invested in her all the way, thanks to Corio.
Aftersun has no easy answers.
Aftersun isn’t interested in laying every bit of Sophie and Calum’s history bare. If you want straight-up answers, you won’t get them. What you will get is a deep dive into our search for meaning in memory.
In Aftersun’s most surreal sequences, adult Sophie — now the same age as Calum when they took the trip together — wanders through a crowd of dancers, trying to get a glimpse of her father through flashes of strobing lights. Elsewhere, she wakes up on her birthday and turns on the home videos she took of that long-ago vacation, poring over the footage in search of clues. Her search for meaning in the past makes us look harder as well. Is there anything we can catch about Calum that she may have missed? Or has the distortions of memory made the truth impossible to decipher?
Adding to these ideas of unreliable memory is Wells’s keen direction. She establishes distance between Calum and Sophie onscreen, often filtering important moments through walls, panes of glass, or the home movies. Aural distance is created in scenes where characters’ voices are lightly muffled, like when Calum takes a call in a phone booth. At other times, scenes play out in mirrors or in a camera’s viewfinder, and we’re reminded that we’re watching a reflection of a conversation, and not the conversation itself. We experience a sense of removal, just as adult Sophie experiences a removal from her memories of the vacation. We look back with her fascinated, but unable to get closer.
A third-act dance scene where both Sophie and Calum let loose is as close to catharsis as Aftersun gets, but even then there’s an accompanying sense of loss. It’s perhaps the best encapsulation of the film’s combination of sweetness and sadness, and it makes for a truly poignant climax.
In the end, Wells, Mescal, and Corio have created a film that is touching, tragic, and one of the best looks at the relationships between a parent and child in recent years.
Aftersun was reviewed out of the 60th New York Film Festival; it opens in theaters Oct. 21.
