Aftersun(2022)

 

‘Aftersun’ Review: A Father and Time

A daughter’s memory of a vacation in Turkey is at the heart of Charlotte Wells’s astonishing and devastating debut feature.

The relationship between a parent and a child is wired for heartbreak — a primal attachment headed for an inevitable double grief. Kids grow up and flee the nest. Parents die. It’s the natural order of things, calamitous even when no untimely tragedies intervene to amplify the pain.

Such a tragedy does shadow “Aftersun,” the tender and devastating first feature from the 35-year-old Scottish director Charlotte Wells, but the power of the film comes from its embrace of the basic and universal fact of loss. It’s about a mostly happy experience — a father-daughter vacation in a resort town on the Turkish coast, with snorkeling excursions, hotel buffets and lazy hours by the pool — that ends in tears. Your tears.

Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), are mostly too caught up in the delights and frustrations of the present to express much sorrow or anxiety, but they also seem aware that time is moving quickly. Sophie, on the edge of adolescence, is both hanging onto childhood and rushing toward maturity. Her eyes are always moving, scanning her surroundings for clues and portents.

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A young man himself — he’s about to turn 31 and is mistaken by a fellow tourist for Sophie’s older brother — Calum carries some weariness in his lithe frame. His boyish features are creased with worry. We don’t learn much about his history — Wells is not thekind of director to spoil delicate scenes with expository dialogue — but we’re aware that he and Sophie’s mother aren’t together. We can also infer some hard knocks and bad decisions in his past.

 From the very first scenes, the presence of camcorders and the absence of smartphones places the trip in the past. A grown-up Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who at 31 has a partner and a baby, is remembering those sun-dappled mornings and karaoke nights (she sang “Losing My Religion”) of 20 years before.

The final moments of the film reveal that Sophie is watching Calum on the videotapes they had recorded on vacation. The opening scene establishes that someone is playing the recordings on a TV. The same is evident when Sophie interviews Calum about turning thirty-one. The interview leads to one of the most gut-wrenching yet nonchalant revelations in the movie, as Calum tells Sophie about being abused as a child. The moment provides us with the first hint of the reason Sophie is watching the tapes and, more importantly, why she is stuck at this particular moment when the film starts.

As we later learn, Adult Sophie is married to a woman and has a baby. Moreover, she is turning thirty-two and faces the same mental battles as her father, or at least similar ones. Thus, Sophie is able to see the other side of Calum that she could not see as a child. The same is evident in the movie as the camera lingers on seemingly irrelevant visuals while the dialog takes place off-screen. Such a visual treatment represents that Sophie is rewatching the videotapes and recognizing all the times she failed to see her father’s struggles.