Calum (Paul Mescal) is celebrating his thirty-first birthday on a vacation to Turkey with his eleven-year-old daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), who captures the trip through the lens of her MiniDV camera.  The two revel in each other’s company, but there is also a distance that Sophie notices as her father begins to show signs of withdrawal, anxiety, and is seldom without a drink in his hand.  Too young to put words to it, she busies herself with some other teenagers at the resort, showing off her skills at the pool table, drinking sodas at the bar, and sharing her first kiss with a boy she met at the arcade.  It is not until Sophie is older (Celia Rowlson-Hall), and with a child of her own, that she begins to understand the depression which her father was fighting when she was younger. 

For A24, Charlotte Wells writes and directs Aftersun, a stream-of-conscious tone poem put to film grappling with ideas of what it means to be a daughter and a parent; ultimately, though, it wants to understand what it means to love someone who is hurting.  Premiering at Cannes, the film won the French Touch Prize of the Jury which honors the debut efforts of filmmakers, and it went on to build a reputation for itself across the festival circuit through to its limited theatrical release before heading to VOD.  Wells is not the only fresh face in the film, this is Corio’s first feature, and though Mescal has a handful of credits on his resume already – including another A24 feature, God’s Creatures from earlier in the year – his turn as Calum seems to have minted him as a rising indie star. 

It may be hard to believe it, but films set in the 90s, as Aftersun is, are period pieces now pulling on details and nostalgia of a time passed. Wells is not the first director to put these modern memories on film – Greta Gerwig and Jonah Hill both made their directorial debuts with Lady Bird (2017) and mid90s (2018), coincidently enough all released by A24 – but what is most unique about this rising segment of memoir films is it is right at the cusp of the fracturing of pop culture into the near-endless subsets of subsets of genre that we live in now. There is still a unity, but fading, as the rise of technology, clunky as it may have been, begins to insert itself into the every day, and there are elements of the struggle of growing up and growing apart present in all three of these titles. This is not a condemnation of the technology – and there is a very valid argument that without those massive advances in digital cinema that none of these titles may have been made – but it is examining a turning point in society when the world was opened up into something much larger than the small town one was born into, for both better and for worse.  What makes these pieces so difficult to pull off, though, is the recency; many in the audience will look and remember their own first DV camera, the Gateway desktop hogging a table to itself in the family room, or the cell phone shared with siblings. There can be no shorthand when it comes to the details. In Aftersun, Wells, with her production designer Billur Turan, do an exceptional job at recreating this time and place and through their specificity, they are able to create a sense of universality.   

The film is largely a two-hander between Corio and Mescal, told from Sophie’s perspective as she seeks to understand her father. Corio, though, is the driving force behind the film and it is incredible how natural she feels in front of the camera, a testament undoubtedly to Wells’ careful direction and cinematographer Gregory Oke for aiding in the creation of a safe environment for the young actress to be so vulnerable. One of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the entire film which is already heavily peppered with poignant moments comes at around the halfway point during karaoke night when Sophie has signed her and her dad up to perform REM’s “Losing My Religion,” something we come to understand is a bit of a tradition between the two. Calum, who may not be drunk enough yet and still has some guard up around himself, remains seated, turning this duet with his daughter into a solo performance. Oke’s camera, while it does offer some cutaways to capture Calum’s reaction, is largely more interested in Sophie, alone in front of the crowd. There is an incredible feeling and abandonment and loneliness up there with her, but still with slivers of confidence that will lead to the more daring, adventurous, and independent Sophie that occupies the latter half of the film. The fact that she is growing up and growing apart from her father will become even more apparent later that evening when she needs to retrieve her key from reception to be let back into the room only to find her father passed out, naked, on the bed. Sophie reacts, not with anger, but with compassion, still without the words or the world view to fully contextualize what she is seeing, but understanding, concretely for the first time, that her father is hurting and not the care-free, fun, and invincible man she believed him to be.  

Aftersun does not ask Corio to bear the weight of forgiveness toward her father. That is saved for Rowlson-Hall’s portrayal of the daughter through the framework of a rave sequence that interrupts this flow of memory, revealed to be the adult Sophie viewing these tapes with a new understanding of her father. The device has been nothing short of divisive with audiences as the flashing lights of the rave are a jarring change of pace from the lazy Turkish summer, especially in the early half of the film when Wells is still building that trust with her audience. At the end of the 102-minute trip through the aisles of memory, the rave sequences do fit well into the narrative and perfectly visualize the feeling of understanding someone, perhaps a bit too late, as Sophie is bumped and pushed by dancers until finally finding her father, only to have the crowd create a division yet again. This visual motif, so poetic in its construction, rewards the patient observer. 

To call the film a mystery seems a little odd as it is certainly not a whodunit caper, but much of the film is the adult Sophie watching this tape with the question of motive, seeking to understand why her father was the way he was. Visually, this is achieved by keeping Mescal always at an arm’s distance away from us, and when the camera does dare to creep closer to him, he is often seen through a window, a reflection, or his back is to us. It is not standoffish in its nature, but it puts audiences back into that headspace of a child rolling their eyes when their parent does something strange. Aftersun is a collection of those moments that, as they happened seemed like isolated incidents because there was plenty of fun to be had on this birthday trip, too, but when viewed collectively it brings about a deep sense of despair and melancholy that weigh Calum down. Mescal conveys so much emotion in the physicality of this sparse, but not underwritten, role of a father with so much wearing him down yet he tries – and sometimes, fails – to put the best foot forward for his daughter; to protect her a little longer from the stresses and the turmoil of adult life. It is a difficult role because there is a clear distance between the father and daughter despite the love that is also abundantly present, but a moment late in the film where the weight becomes far too much and he breaks down sobbing is the last piece of the Calum Puzzle, and it contextualizes the struggles the young man was facing. Mescal, like Corio, is unflinching in front of Oke’s camera and unafraid to plumb the depths of Wells’ script which allows him to deliver a tender and nuanced performance that picks ups on all the subtext of the story so that he does not fall into the trap of a deadbeat dad and lose audience sympathy. 

What is most surprising about Aftersun is that it feels so carefully thought out and presented that it is incredible this amount of control was achieved in a debut feature. With an initial cut of the film reportedly running some 150 minutes, Blair McClendon’s editing process is akin to making a collage from a mountain of magazine clippings. That is not a discredit to any of the writing or the direction, but rather a testament that these vignettes were able to be taken and rearranged and trimmed down to create something so flowing and ethereal even with almost an hour’s worth of story stripped away. With that being said, it is still not the easiest film to break into, the first half is seemingly incredibly passive as it captures loose moments held together only by its unity of place, but for those who do place their trust and faith in Wells, she paints a portrait of simmering grief that haunted and informed an adolescent through to her growth into adulthood in an unconventional yet deeply affecting manner. There is no grandstanding or melodrama, no arguments or shouting matches, it all culminates into a simple hug; the comforting and encompassing love we give to hurting people, sometimes more powerful than any words that we could muster.