Exhilarating Father-daughter drama, starring Paul Mescal
Charlotte Wells’s debut feature is a stylistically daring, emotionally piercing, beautifully understated tale of love and loss.
A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this feature may seem improvised or accidental in its details, but Wells’ storytelling skills are as precise as they are piercing.
We meet separated father Calum (Normal People’s Paul Mescal), around 30, and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio), on holiday together in Turkey in the 1990s.
Sophie is smart for her age (she and Calum are often mistaken for siblings), but she’s still also very much a child, torn between hanging out with the younger kids at the resort or with the more boisterous teenagers who lounge around the pool table.
Calum’s outward calm and easygoing manner suggest a cover for various demons of anguish and denial; a trancey energy that threatens to break through the placid surface of his current life, dragging him back into chaotic existence.
Scrappy DV-cam footage offers evidence of the interactions between Sophie and Calum, with both roles performed with breathtaking naturalism.
Aftersun is constructed as a very personal recollection, filtered through a haze of memory and imagination by the now-adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back on things she didn’t really understand as a girl.
That tension between fact and fiction – between recorded and remembered events – draws us deep into the drama, causing us to examine every frame as if searching for clues to a hidden truth that remains elusive.
It often seems as if the real story is playing out beyond the edges of the frame, in the shadows beyond the confines of the screen.
Editor Blair McClendon juxtaposes sounds and images in hyperreal, dreamlike fashion, conjuring a magical space in which time seems to bend emotionally.
Wells says the roots of Aftersun lay in flipping through holiday albums of herself as a child and being struck by how young her father looked. Later, she came across a photo in which she was sitting by a pool in Spain, with “a very beautiful woman right behind me… and it made me wonder who the real subject of the picture was.”
That sense of mystery runs throughout this feature, which, despite being set largely in the past, feels peculiarly present.
Some of the groundwork for Aftersun was laid in Wells’s 2015 short film Tuesday–she has called this “a sequel of sorts, in a different place and time.”
Just Lynn Ramsay has an almost uncanny ability to capture the texture of memories on screen, so Wells showcases a Proustian talent for transporting the audience back into a world they didn’t actually experience, while making them feel like they did.
There are also traces of the films of Margaret Tait in Wells’s craft, specifically Blue Black Permanent (1992), which seems to have served as tonal reference; a volume of Tait’s writings is displayed on screen.
Gregory Oke’s cinematography captures the color of memory, with bright exteriors and glowing surfaces carefully graded by Kath Raisch to evoke vivid snapshots of fleeting moments.
