Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ debut feature film Aftersun is a stunning journey of remembrance. A reflective father-daughter drama that plays like a foggy memory, the film takes a life of its own in a dream-like haze as it slowly pieces together fragments of moments from a vacation taken long ago.
In the film, 11-year-old Sophie (Francesca Corio) and 31-year-old Calum (Paul Mescal) are on holiday at a Turkish resort, an occasion which Wells implies to be the last time Sophie ever sees her father. We catch glimpses of an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) reminiscing about the trip, revisiting home videos with a hint of bittersweet nostalgia. There is a heavy sense of longing in Sophie, seen in these brief flashes that are scattered intermittently throughout the film. She is searching for clues, for signs, for some form of closure within the gaps of her memories that might make the aching loss of the relationship with her father more comprehensible. It is here that we begin to understand that Aftersun is about more than just a wistful summer vacation during the ‘90s, but rather a daughter’s attempt at fully understanding her father.
Aftersun is presented through the eyes of a young Sophie, who is experiencing life through a rose-tinted lens of innocence. The film operates as a coming-of-age journey for the young girl, who often finds herself entranced by the resort’s local teenagers, silently watching and tailing behind, as well as experiencing her first real encounters with young boys. A first kiss, an awkward date, it has all the ingredients of what makes adolescence so wonderfully pure.
It makes sense, then, that Sophie’s preteen brain doesn’t quite understand her father yet completely but is still, to a certain degree, aware that something is off. Whether it be bitterly shutting down Sophie’s request to sing R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” together on a karaoke night or disappearing into night walks into the ocean, there is a mystery behind Calum’s occasional distance that establishes an emotional tension into the vacation, bringing to life the complicated reality that our parents are imperfect and human, too.
Mescal, known for his remarkable performances in the hit limited series Normal People and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, captures Calum’s nuances with a quiet depth. His eyes bloom with a soft affection for his daughter, and the relationship between him and Sophie is one that is full of an intimate warmth. He makes sure to massage soothing Aftersun aloe vera onto her face after their hot summer days, a tender act of protection that may go unnoticed. As a young father, they are often mistaken for siblings. Even so, this tight age gap allows the duo to co-exist in a playful manner. Mescal masterfully switches between a muted, yet content happiness to repressed anguish all at once, subtly presenting the darker cracks beneath Calum’s surface and his silent mental health struggles. He is deeply flawed, though handled with a delicacy that makes it very easy to understand why Sophie loves him so dearly.
Aftersun is a stellar debut by Wells that paints a devastating portrait of childhood and memory, softly flowing in a manner similar to that of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman or Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. It is constructed together by a series of half-remembered moments, home videos, and hallucinatory dreams that, although may remind us of the passing of time, also spotlights the ways in which our memories remain with us, for better or worse. There are far too many things that don’t make sense when we’re young, and they only begin to form any semblance of meaning as we get older, and Aftersun aptly captures the ways in which our memories have the striking ability to shift over time and endure.
