A moving meditation on memory, nostalgia, and loss, “Aftersun” is positively radiant, and left me reeling in its glow. To say that Charlotte Wells’ feature debut, the story of an 11-year-old girl’s seaside vacation with her 31-year-old father, shows promise is to do the film and its filmmaker a disservice. The bittersweet drama’s ability to encapsulate such a vast array of emotions while welcoming us into its young protagonist’s world through her older, wisened eyes is masterful — and all the more impressive since “Aftersun” is Wells’ first film.
A rare father-daughter story, “Aftersun” takes place in Turkey, where Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio) and Calum (Paul Mescal, “Normal People”) reunite on a resort holiday. We don’t get much in the way of exposition, but Sophie lives with her mom, who seems to be on good terms with her ex: a brief, sweet conversation sees Sophie inquiring why her dad tells her mom that he loves her on the phone despite the fact that they’re no longer together.
Asked by Sophie if he’ll ever move back home, Calum explains, “There’s this feeling once you leave where you’re from that you don’t totally belong there again.” Both he and Sophie are in transitional periods. Calum is struggling to figure out exactly who he is outside of being a father — and whether he’s home or abroad, you get the sense that he never feels like he belongs — and Sophie’s on the verge of adolescence. “You never know where you’ll end up,” he tells the pre-teen. “You can live wherever you want to live. Be whoever you want to be. You have time.” Unspoken but implied is the fact that he doesn’t have that same luxury.
Much is left unsaid in “Aftersun,” but thanks to Corio and Mescal’s lived-in chemistry, it’s communicated all the same. At one point Calum asks Sophie to put away the camcorder that she’s recording him with, her line of questioning having made him feel overly exposed. “I’ll just record it in my little mind camera,” she says. Wells’ excavation into the footage of that “mind camera” is illuminating, heartbreaking, and above all, wholly immersive. This deceptively simple story’s layers continue to unravel after the credits roll.
“Aftersun” is now in theaters.
