Aftersun begins with a seemingly normal status quo. A dad, Calum (Paul Mescal) is taking his daughter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), to a hotel resort in Turkey for a little summertime vacation before school starts up again. Only a little into the movie do you start to notice a few things askew. Namely, our adult protagonist has a cast…where did he get that injury? The hotel is also quietly shoddy, with lots of intrusive construction and the only activities for kids being some racing arcade game. The script never pokes you in the ribs that something is awry here, but it beckons you to gaze deeper into the frame. From there, you also begin to notice the little details about the humans on-screen.
Like a camcorder adjusting its image after someone presses the zoom-in button, key aspects of Aftersun come into focus with a little bit of time. There's an underlying sadness to seemingly throwaway lines like Calum mentioning "I can't imagine myself at 40" during a scuba trip with Sophie. Meanwhile, initially fun moments like Calum and Sophie throwing bread at a dinnertime entertainer before bolting without paying for their meal initially come off as just frivolous father/daughter bonding...but what does this moment really suggest about Calum? All of these details mean that Aftersun begins with a sense of extensive history between the characters. They’re all deeply entrenched into their behavior patterns, such as Calum still saying “love you” to his ex-wife or Sophie's inclination to read a magazine about women rather than the weighty book her father insists she reads. There’s an enormously lived-in quality to these characters conveyed in such realistically understated means.
The exploits of these characters become more and more strained as the runtime wears on, with initially joyful if slightly contained interactions giving way to much more troubling evenings. The peak of these problems comes one night when Calum gets intoxicated and opts to go to bed early, leaving Sophie to fend for herself below. Sophie finds tender warmth with other people that night, including a girl who gives her an all-access wristband and a boy she kisses. But not with her father, whom she desperately tries to connect to.
Writer/director Charlotte Wells, in what's shockingly her feature-length directorial debut, often captures these kinds of internal emotions in Aftersun with a dreamlike quality that proves as emotionally insightful as it does visually imaginative. A scene of Calum drunkenly walking around at night at one point depicts this figure against a vast sea of blackness, like he’s stumbled into the void from Under the Skin. It’s such a striking image, seeing this solitary man alone against an endless and ominous landscape devoid of specific details. Other times, the camera opts for closer, intimate shots, many of which are used to illustrate the point-of-view of our adolescent protagonist. Now 11 years old and eager to look back on her 7-year-old self as “way younger,” she’s often hanging out with teenagers at this resort. These more cramped shots see her lingering on the finer details of these older figures she wants to hang around and reinforce her desire to get closer to this particular social group.
Nowhere does Wells shine more as a visualist than in recurring glimpses of a dance floor that's set against a darkened backdrop and illuminated in brief bursts of light. Initially just a striking visual motif throughout Aftersun, it culminates in a final sequence revealing this to be a place where an adult Sophie is coping with the complicated image she has of her father. This stretch of Aftersun is like the love child of Beau Travail and Mulholland Drive, a nightmarish display of dancing told through quick cuts that reflected the fragmented feelings Sophie has for Calum. It's a mesmerizing feat of filmmaking perfectly accompanied by a hauntingly sparse version of the Queen/David Bowie ditty "Under Pressure." Never before have lyrics like "Why can't we give love one more chance?" taken on such weight.
I was utterly mesmerized by this sequence in Aftersun, but it's not the only part of the movie that impressed me. Far from it. That first reveal of this movie stretching across time in a non-linear fashion, when we cut to an adult Sophie in bed with her wife, that made me gasp out loud. It was just such a bold direction to take this story, it perfectly accentuates the emphasis of memory in the story, and the organically subdued way we're told this is adult Sophie is incredibly impressive. The writing of adolescent Sophie, too, is incredible. Much like with the works from Studio Ghibli, Wells knows how to write kids who sound and act like kids, their imperfections all apparent.
The beautiful suggestion of a larger emotional world between each word work wonders at touching the heart while Wells demonstrates quietly profound tendencies in every aspect of her screenplay. Her level of insight and thought is apparent in even the tiniest details, like the tunes that are always blaring at tourist-friendly events in the Turkey hotel Sophie and Calum are staring at ("Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba is especially perfect, of course, that's what they'd be playing). Her controlled filmmaking is also captured in the performances, which include an outstanding turn from Paul Mescal. Having not seen his show Normal People, I had no real notions of his qualities as an actor beyond the fact that somebody at A24 digs him (Aftersun is one of two Mescal titles the studio is releasing this Fall).
But good God, he's fantastic here, deftly playing a goofy dad but also realistically hinting at darker, more vulnerable qualities within Calum. It's such a rich performance that I couldn't get out of my brain while Frankie Coiro delivers similarly superb work playing Sophie. She and Pascal are playing such wildly different characters in Aftersun, but they share the quality of handling complexity like a champ. Watching performances and a movie this good is a gift and I urge you to do yourself a favor and experience it for yourself, especially on a big screen where your full attention can be absorbed by every emotionally captivating detail Charlotte Wells has laced throughout Aftersun.
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