Aftersun Review: A Heartbreaking Portrait of a Father-Daughter Relationship

With her debut feature, Aftersun, writer-director Charlotte Wells crafts an arresting, achingly nostalgic portrait of a father-daughter relationship at once close and deeply fraught. When the thirtysomething Calum’s (Paul Mescal) preteen daughter, Sophie (Francesca Corio), joins him for a vacation at a resort in Turkey, the two seem to fall back into the trusting, copacetic relationship that was interrupted by Calum’s self-imposed flight from their native Scotland. But as suggested by the flashes to the future, in which the adult Sophie (played by Celia Rowlson-Hall) imagines that she sees the unaged Calum in the strobe-light chaos of a nightclub, this trip may have been the last time she saw her father.

In the main action of the film, it’s the late 1990s and camcorders are still an essential component of the vacation experience. Aftersun opens with an excerpt from a recording made by Sophie using her father’s Digital8 camcorder. Sophie has just turned 11 and wants to know what her father thinks his 11-year-old self thought he would be doing today. As any number of adults would, Calum demurs, but there’s an insistence to his silence that speaks to a deeper pain. Throughout, Mescal’s performance accentuates the handsome, breezily friendly Calum’s fundamental disappointment with himself in such moments of quiet withdrawal, as when he later pouts instead of joining Sophie in a little bit of goofy karaoke.

As in Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time and the Netflix horror series Archive 81, Aftersun languishes in the choppiness of the long-passé home video image, using its fuzziness to evoke the unreliability of memory and inexorable passing of time. The opening scene freezes on a motion-blurred frame of the back of Calum’s head, artifacting into randomly distributed squares as it rewinds in the uncanny fashion of early digital video. The scenes set in the ’90s periodically return to Sophie’s video journal, using it to both anchor the experience of the Turkey trip in Sophie’s point of view and to underline just how little the video captures.

Across the film, Sophie and Calum meet other people, including a group of friendly English teens who, impressed with Sophie’s billiard skills, let her hang around them. But despite their time together, these teens barely register as characters. That, though, is by design, as Aftersun constructs a pointedly insular world, with Sophie and Calum as its unmistakable center. The two have an open, almost egalitarian relationship, with Calum at one point making Sophie promise that as she gets older, she’ll never hesitate to tell him about the boys she meets, the parties she goes to, the drugs she does. To which she predictably exclaims, “Dad!”

Despite this openness, most of what goes on between Calum and Sophie goes unsaid, and Wells and editor Blair McClendon astoundingly convey the inner worlds of these characters via shot selection and editing rhythms. Without any intrusive stylizations or exposition, we come to empathize with Sophie’s maturing perspective—her comprehension of the libidinous conversations of the older girls she overhears in the resort’s bathroom, and the way, at the age of 10, she already knows to put on a happy face for her mentally unwell father.

Corio’s naturalistic realization of the independent and canny Sophie is especially extraordinary, and is integral to why Aftersun feels so personal and deeply felt. But much of what lends her performance this clarity is Wells’s decision to invest so much meaning into the composition of her images, as when she uses Calum and Sophie’s modest hotel room to depict their diverging worlds, with Sophie reading in the glowing, orange-hued room framed alongside Calum in a languid struggle to remove his cast in the gray, sparsely lit bathroom.

Aftersun produces such resonant images at a pace that belies the more relaxed rhythms of its story. Isolated with the father-daughter pair in the resort where they seem to spend almost their entire vacation, one can’t help but be struck by the airy irreality of the paragliders who silently glide through the frame over Sophie and Calum’s heads as the pair lounges about, only outwardly freed from worldly concern. Or by the image of a frustrated Calum diving into the murky depths of the ocean in a futile attempt to retrieve a pair of goggles.

Aftersun’s climax, which involves a more intense threading together of the grown-up Sophie’s imagined sighting of her father at the club with the end of their Turkish vacation 20 years earlier—and set to the isolated vocals of David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure”—might bring what Wells has already made clear a bit too close to the surface. But it also works as a boiling over of what has been kept simmering throughout the film: the searing pain of loss that’s led Sophie to reflect on the past, and to hallucinate her still youthful father thrashing among patrons at a club in the first place. Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.