Aftersun (2022)
dir. Charlotte Wells
Rated: R
image: ©2022 A24
My wife fell asleep while we were watching Aftersun. It was in no way the movie’s fault; she hadn’t slept well the night before and had struggled most of the day with drowsiness. Rae found it hard to believe me when I assured her that nothing bad, traumatizing, or depressing happens over the course of Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s quietly touching debut feature.
I wasn’t lying. Nothing worse than the loss of an expensive scuba mask and a few strained moments between a father and daughter appears on the screen. Nevertheless, Wells expertly crafts a sense of dread throughout Aftersun, often barely detectable, on the edges of the frame. Her film is a marvel of delicate restraint mixed with subtle, deep emotion.
Aftersun tells the story of 11-year-old Sophie and her father, Calum, as they vacation together at a Turkish resort hotel. The Scottish dad is about to turn 31, and he tells a diving instructor that he’s surprised he made it to thirty. He also says he doubts that he’ll make it to forty.
That’s one of the first clues we get that Calum is in a bad way. Since this is Sophie’s story – and these are the memories of an adult Sophie on her own 31st birthday – we experience this exchange as if it were a child’s memory of adults talking about things she doesn’t understand. We hear the dialog between father and scuba instructor as the camera takes in the beauty of the ocean. It’s almost as if her father’s pained admission is incidental to the glory of the day in Sophie’s memories of the trip.
In an interview, Wells said of Aftersun, “It’s not autobiographical, per se, but I think of it as being emotionally autobiographical.” In my research for the review, I couldn’t find any concrete details about Wells’s own father, only that her film was a way for Wells to work through her own grief after “the loss of my dad as a teenager.” Her cageyness on the matter dovetails with the ambiguity baked into the picture Wells has made.
We can sense – as can the precocious, curious Sophie – that something is wrong with Calum, beyond his divorce from Sophie’s mom and his precarious financial situation. There’s a detachment in Calum, as if he can’t fully enjoy the moment, no matter how hard he tries to hide that fact from his daughter.
Wells leaves it at that, as Aftersun’s perspective is tied inextricably to her preteen protagonist’s point of view. She allows her audience to connect the dots for ourselves, which makes for a much more ethereal, dreamlike (read: memory-like) quality.
This is true for the little details as well as the big ones. We know the story takes place sometime in the late 1990s, but only via the mini-DV camera footage Sophie shoots and watches during the vacation and the prevalence in one scene of a hit dance song/craze of the era. Anyone who lived through the unavoidable popularity of Macarena knows that its presence here narrows things down to a specific one- to two-year period.
It's the scene featuring Macarena that shows us how close Sophie and Calum are, how much they’re on the same team. After the song starts, other of the resort’s guests get up from their outdoor dining tables to join in on the dance floor. Dad and daughter both lob their dinner rolls the 30-or-so feet to the dance floor in an act of — for Calum, late — juvenile delinquency, then they make a mad dash into the night before they can be admonished.
This nuanced portrayal of a parent/child relationship makes room for the unpleasant moments, too. In one scene, Sophie wants to do karaoke with her dad, like they’ve always done together while on holiday. Calum doesn’t feel like it and is peeved when he realizes that Sophie has signed them both up to sing. Sophie, in defiance of her dad refusing to get up, goes to the mic and performs the R.E.M. hit Losing My Religion by herself.
When Sophie gets back to her seat, Calum offers to pay for singing lessons, should she want to improve. The perceptive girl counters the backhanded offer by asking her dad why he would make such a suggestion when he has no way to pay for such a thing. It’s everyday pettiness between people who know each other so well that goading each other for the desired reaction is as easy as second nature. It’s also the kind of everyday pettiness that is lamentable upon hindsight.
Wells takes delicate care to shape a complete portrait of young Sophie in this coming-of-age reminiscence. Through a bathroom keyhole, Sophie hears two older girls talking about their initial sexual adventures. One describes to the other a tryst she had with a boy, and Sophie sees, through the keyhole, the girl motion back and forth with her cupped hand to show her friend what she did.
In various scenes, we see Sophie play a motorbike video game with a young boy who is also staying at the resort. The two end up hanging out in a secluded indoor swimming pool, and the boy tells Sophie that he likes her. When he asks if she likes him, she answers in the affirmative, then the two share their first kiss. Later, Sophie sees two young men making out through the open doorway of a room below her own. It’s a discovery that might have been foundational to Sophie unlocking her own sexual identity, an identity which is confirmed to us in the rare, brief flashforward scenes we see of Sophie as an adult.
Again, Wells leaves the interpretation vague, but that is of a piece with the story she’s telling. Who of us, after all, could know at the time how foundational a certain event experienced at age 11 would be on shaping our future?
The two leads in Aftersun, 26-year-old Paul Mescal, as Calum, and 12-year-old Frankie Corio – who had never acted before being cast in the role of Sophie – have a familiar, lived-in quality that feels as genuine as a real-life father and daughter. For the two-week rehearsal, the two actors hung out together at a real holiday resort, in order to build a rapport that would read as authentic on screen.
Corio’s debut acting effort is, quite simply, effortless. She’s a natural in front of the camera, and the wise-ass personality and intellectual curiosity she imbues in Sophie is sublime. Mescal laces his performance as Calum with an ineffable melancholy. The most direct exhibition of his deep sadness comes in a simple sequence in which we see Calum crying uncontrollably while Sophie isn’t around. His back faces the camera, as if Calum can’t bear to let even us see the extent of his emotional distress.
While spending time together in the ocean, Sophie tells her dad about her first kiss. Calum is careful to make clear to his daughter that she can tell him anything. She can tell him who she kisses or what kind of drugs she uses, because, he tells her, he’s used them all, so it’s safe for her to trust him with such information. For her part, Sophie laughs and admonishes her dad, ensuring him that she will never use drugs.
It’s an uplifting scene, until you pair it with another sequence in which we see Calum holding Sophie by the wrists, instructing her on how to get loose should anyone ever try to attack her. Watching it, I got the sense that Calum was trying to prepare his daughter for a time when he wouldn’t be around to protect her.
The darkest moment of the movie, the moment that gives us the clearest view into what Calum is experiencing, lasts less than a second. After a long day out in the sun and fun of the resort, Sophie offhandedly mentions to her dad that she’s tired.
It’s not the kind of tiredness that a quick nap will alleviate, though. “[I’m] still a bit down or something,” Sophie says when her dad asks how she is. It’s clear she doesn’t fully understand what she’s feeling. “Don’t you ever feel, like, tired and down and feels like your bones don’t work, like you’re sinking?”
Calum is in the bathroom brushing his teeth in anticipation of going out to dinner. After Sophie, lying on her bed, makes these remarks, Calum spits in disgust all over the mirror before quickly turning off the light and walking out of the bathroom. The movie never spells it out, but in this moment, we intuit that Calum knows exactly what Sophie is feeling, and that he’s under constant threat of succumbing to those same feelings that he’s now passed on to his daughter.
Wells leaves it at only that intoxicating sense of what might have happened after that long ago holiday. It’s left as opaque why the adult Sophie might be reflecting on this trip with her dad, especially on the eve of her own 31st birthday.
The main story sequences and the flashforwards to the adult Sophie are interspersed throughout with brief rave-style dance sequences. A strobe light flashes rapidly, making the people we see only discernable for fractions of a second at a time. In these sequences, we see, at various points, Calum moving drunkenly through the crowd, as well as both child-Sophie trying to find her dad and adult-Sophie trying to help her dad stay on his feet.
The most transcendent of these rave scenes comes with Queen and David Bowie’s stirring Under Pressure – a song famously about people struggling with life in the modern world – in which the music slowly drops out and we are left only with Freddie Mercury and Bowie’s haunting vocals. It’s a darkly beautiful moment in a movie that offers a bracing portrayal of depression, grief, and regret via a dreamlike aesthetic.
Why it got 4 stars:
At the risk of overusing the word, Aftersun is a wonderfully delicate film. It gives us a look at a young girl on the verge of becoming a young woman and a man in the midst of a quiet mental crisis with a beauty that shouldn’t fit the story, but nevertheless does.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There is a clever match cut early in the film. The match isn’t centered on visuals, but on the sound of snoring. It’s an inventive little editing moment.
- The sloooooow pans and tilts in the movie tie us, metaphorically, even more to Sophie’s perspective. Eleven is an age when the future feels like it will never get here, and the almost slow-cinema aesthetic reinforces that notion.
- Another inventive moment comes when Sophie and her dad are having a heart-to-heart, and the whole thing is captured in the reflection of a turned-off television set. It’s an effective callback to the days when TV screens were made of glass, and the interesting framing choice speaks to the dark mental space Calum is in.
- The great Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) served as a producer on Aftersun.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this via a “for your consideration” screener disc. I have to imagine seeing those strobing rave scenes on the big screen would have been outstanding.