Aftersun: Emotions on Holiday
This review contains a brief discussion of suicide.
Full credit to @qiongwuart for the cover sketch.
The impact of Charlotte Wells’ debut feature-length on the indie film circuit since its release in 2022 has been nothing short of seismic. Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019) was the last independent British film which garnered anywhere near as much word-of-mouth hype as Aftersun — and even Bait, sensational as it was, earned only two nominations at BIFA, compared with Aftersun’s staggering fifteen. The latter’s success in the awards season is mirrored by the profound effect it has had on a diverse audience. Reasons for this effect will be explored in what follows.
In Aftersun, we follow young father Calum (Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (screen newcomer Frankie Corio) on holiday in Turkey in the late ’90s; they have a gentle, seemingly uncomplicated relationship, while a sense of quiet unease brews throughout, never fully explained. Framing the holiday is an adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) on her 31st birthday — the same age Calum turns on the trip — piecing together memories of her father with footage from a DV camcorder.
Aftersun is a radically moving film. As the best kind of films do, it embarks on a subtle yet penetrating unravelling of emotional reality. It is viscerally effective in its presentation not just of a father-daughter relationship, but of the fallibility of memory, and the yearning desire for the human mind to capture ‘reality’ in a world dominated by recording technology which can be endlessly edited. Paul Mescal continues to impress in a career that has already solidified him as a master of naturalism; Corio accompanies him with a markedly unaffected, deceptively simple performance.
Hardly a moment goes by in which the central pair are not utterly believable. At the best of times ‘believable’ is a flawed metric for the success of a film, but for a piece like Aftersun it is crucial that we are not thinking about how much of a hotshot Paul Mescal is (contra some fellow cinemagoers who may or may not have been discussing how much they were attracted to him, during the film).
The makers of Aftersun have achieved an elusive feat in expressing the experience of memory — one of cinema’s key functions (as I have explored in previous reviews) — in a language that a large audience has connected with. This achievement is the result of an extremely successful collaboration. Virtually all the film’s departments have (deservedly) been getting a nod for awards — and while much discussion below will be on the director specifically, it is worth bearing in mind that the most beautiful pieces of cinema are always the result of a group effort. That a film can be at once a technical achievement and an emotional experience is a special magic of the art form.
Wells, alongside her cinematographer Gregory Oke, clearly has a penchant for a convincing naturalism, but also a kind of hyper-realism. We are dealing simultaneously with a slice-of-life, mildly nostalgic ’90s drama and with a fluid, dream-like narrative that often plays fast and loose with time (hence perhaps why the film has also been compared to impressionist art.) Some of the smallest moments are the most effective: dialogue between the lead pair in tender moments is often displaced and overlaps with a previous scene, if only for a few seconds.
Subtle sound editing choices like this go hand-in-hand with a moving, understated score from Oliver Coates — and, naturally, some classic ’90s chart toppers. In the wrong hands we may have been subjected to a slightly irritating, overly nostalgic jukebox playlist. And, while the Macarena is employed (almost by necessity) in one of the film’s lighter scenes, the music choices never feel heavy-handed, even though many of the tracks are, to put it lightly, thematically loaded. More on the songs later.
Father-daughter relationships have been an on-screen concern of director Charlotte Wells ever since her first short Tuesday (2015), in which a teenage girl distances herself from family and friends and finds herself traipsing around her (unoccupied?) dad’s house. Aftersun is not autobiographical, but there are clearly some elements of Wells’ life that find their poetic counterparts on screen. There is a photo online which Wells herself published of herself and her father while on holiday in Turkey, virtually the same age as Calum and Sophie are on their own getaway. The likeness to Corio and Mescal is eerie — co-producer Barry Jenkins has joked about Wells’ abject failure to cast ‘away’, not for lack of trying. Around 800 kids auditioned for Sophie’s role, and it seems Corio was simply in another league.
Sophie and Calum’s interactions flow seamlessly between loving ease and a nameless discomfort. For some reviewers this speaks to a truth universally acknowledged about family holidays. The sense that something is wrong takes more forms than the case study of package-holiday Brits abroad in the ’90s, though.
Age, and birthdays of opposite significances, is one factor of this unease. The world is opening up for Sophie as she turns eleven— and she is on the verge of discovering her own sexuality, both suggested implicitly by the many shots that linger on flashes of skin as older teens jump into the pool, and explicitly in Sophie’s (first?) kiss with a boy of the same age. But age has become a scary thing for Calum, who himself says to a tour guide that he can’t believe he made it to 30. In a scene which could otherwise play as a peaceful resolution between the two, Sophie enlists fellow tourists to sing happy birthday for Calum, only for him to have a very hard-to-read reaction.
Money (or lack thereof) is another cause of tension between the pair. Sophie is more than aware that money is tight for her dad. She accidentally drops some expensive scuba goggles into the sea, which Calum rather hopelessly swims after. Much time is spent lingering over the all-inclusive passes Sophie sees on older teens’ wrists (a symbol not just of what she does not have access to, but of the possibilities of her future as a young person). Calum considers buying an expensive rug to take home, to which Sophie says, ‘stop doing that. Stop telling me you’ll pay for things I know you can’t afford’. Later Calum returns without Sophie to buy the rug.
Paul Mescal in Aftersun (2022)
The unifying factor that something is off during the holiday is Calum’s mental state. We are never told what is ‘wrong' with him, but there are plenty of suggestions to pick up on. The rug purchase is a good example of Calum hiding things from his daughter, who is perhaps more perceptive than he realises. In one of the many striking but simple visual metaphors of the film, Calum painfully removes his arm cast out of view from Sophie, while she asks searching questions about his relationship with her mum. He is hiding both his physical pain and his real emotions from her.
Confronting a reality that is somehow uncomfortable — and never explicitly named — runs as a theme through all of Wells’ work to date. Tuesday has already been mentioned; her two 2017 shorts Laps and Blue Christmas deal respectively with a sexual assault on a subway, and a debt collector struggling to keep his family together while his wife grows steadily more psychotic. Aftersun’s subject matter is rather less extreme, and it is in this restraint that a more complex grappling with denial rises to the surface.
The haunting ending of Aftersun takes us further with this thought. Over the course of a double-360 degree pan, we move from a blown-up final photograph of young Sophie, to adult Sophie’s present day apartment, and finally, back to Calum. In an abstraction of the airport corridor where the pair say their goodbyes, he slowly lowers the camcorder, turns, and walks through the double doors back into the silent, strobe-lit rave sequence that has been interspersed throughout our experience of Calum and Sophie’s holiday.
The shot is an example, by Wells’ own admission, of her wearing her influences on her sleeve: Chantal Akerman’s 1972 short La Chambre displays a similar pan of an entire apartment; with every pan, each room appears slightly different, with Akerman herself performing odd, repetitive movements in the apartment’s bed.
The connection between Aftersun and Akerman is poetic as well as technical. Sight and Sound’s decennial top 100 films of all time list is perhaps the most important event of the decade for us film reviewers. Updated in 2022, the list featured a seismic displacement at its very top: while Vertigo and Citizen Kane have between them crowned the last six lists, it was Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles that was the surprise winner. How poetic that in the very same year, Aftersun was voted best film of 2022 by Sight and Sound. Quite the win for female directors.
Back to the ending. The prevailing interpretation here is that the airport is where Sophie sees Calum for the last time. Shortly after the holiday, then, he takes his own life; he never ‘leaves’ the holiday, in reality, as well as in Sophie’s memories. What we see unfold on screen is an adult Sophie sifting through her memories, trying to see what she missed, the warning signs that went unnoticed. A YouTube user comment from @guest_informant handily compiles such signpost moments:
He goes scuba diving without a licence, cut to scene of waves, he doesn't surface, implication - he's drowned. He walks behind the bus, there's a LOUD HORN...but he emerges the other side. Isn't he also balancing on the balcony railings at one point… Also, after one of these scenes the film cuts to a GAME OVER on a computer game screen.
What, then, is going on with the rave sequences? In these gorgeously lit, silent interludes scattered throughout the holiday narrative, we see Calum dancing on his own, ecstatic; at other times an adult Sophie approaches him, and their movement together flows from embrace, to struggle, to angry rejection by Sophie.
Paul Mescal in Aftersun (2022)
It seemed to this reviewer at first that these interludes were an expression of Calum’s inner turmoil, not Sophie’s. On a similar reading, the ending of the film could indicate not that Calum ends his own life, but that moments of the holiday served as a respite from his internal struggles (or some unnamed past trauma) which he ultimately cannot escape.
On consideration of the framing narrative in which the adult Sophie is processing her memories, though, the rave is a striking visual stand-in for experiencing a flash of someone’s face from a memory, and a poignant way to communicate Sophie’s complex feelings for her father. It hence serves simultaneously as a handy break in the narrative, a striking pause for reflection, and the manifestation of the characters’ internal emotional processes — as much Calum’s as Sophie’s, depending on whose perspective we think we are following. It’s worth noting that as Wells herself has said, the final 360-degree pan ties up “all the perspectives” of the film. The sense that we are never quite sure whose point of view we are experiencing — or of what is actually wrong with Calum — is expertly rendered. The game is never given away.
If we are to take the rave sequences as the adult Sophie’s reconstruction of her father, then we might ask why it takes the form of a dance. The answer: she remembers her father as someone for whom movement and dance are incredibly important. When we observe Calum both from Sophie’s point of view and when he is ostensibly ‘unobserved’, he comes across as a lover of motion, as someone who is most at peace when he is connecting with his body. This takes many forms. He is drawn to Tai Chi, dad-dancing (at least from Sophie’s perspective), and a fluidity and strangeness of movement when unobserved. When he puts Sophie to bed after arriving at their hotel, he steps outside for a cigarette, and begins to sway on the spot with an unnameable freedom. Mescal brings all of this wholly, achingly alive.
Calum’s love of dance and movement is matched by considered and effective song choices (Lucy Bright deservedly earned a win at BIFA for Best Music Supervision). The (very painful) karaoke scene, in which Sophie obstinately sings Losing My Religion after her father refuses to join her, was always in the script. Much as the scene’s purpose is simple — colouring Sophie and Calum’s relationship with a twist of resentment and tension — R.E.M.’s lyrics are very appropriate to the framing narrative of the adult Sophie reconstructing her memories of her father: ‘I thought that I heard you laughing / I thought that I heard you sing / I think I thought I saw you try’.
This is not the film’s only use of songs that feature themes of waking up from denial. Bran Van 3000’s Drinking in LA, in which two friends realise that they have done nothing with their day, plays in the background when Sophie is coaxed into pushing a kissing teenage couple into the pool.
The most hard-hitting track comes on the last day of the holiday — Bowie and Queen’s Under Pressure. No other song would have fit as well as this (it was a discovery in the edit room, Wells has said). In an elegant piece of sound design, the song is stripped away at its bridge (‘This is our last dance…’), until the vocals become part of the fabric of the scene.
Aftersun plays out, then, as a dance between memory and reconstruction, between ‘objective’ DV footage and ‘subjective’ moments of a person filling in the gaps of their childhood experience through reflection.
‘Objective’ and ‘subjective’ are in air-quotes because, naturally, it’s not that simple. It has become a truism that every time we remember something, we remember it a little differently. Is that really any different from watching a video again and again? A video stays the ‘same’ on repeat viewings, but our experience of that video does not, in any meaningful sense. And (especially with older camcorders, such as the one in Aftersun) recorded footage devolves from its original state — it can be corrupted.
This is our last dance… Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio in Aftersun (2022)
To a limited extent — brains are not the same as cameras or computers — we do ‘record’ everything we see. So what’s more reliable for understanding the past, documenting it on a literal video recorder, or documenting it in memory? The question is very important for the adult Sophie, who is coming to terms with the father that she has (in some way) lost.
As Aftersun began to gather steam at the end of 2022, Wells released a note to its fans and potential watchers (also linked above). She writes the following:
Memory is a slippery thing; details are hazy, fickle. The more you strain, the less you see. A memory of a memory endlessly corrupting itself.
‘Corrupting’ is a revealing choice of word. Wells herself is clearly concerned with the interplay between recording equipment and memory, or the ‘mind-camera’ as the young Sophie might put it. At first glance they are two completely different registers. But both are equally fallible as measurers of an objective truth. Both can be replayed; both have a limit; both are in dialogue with how we feel.
The most beautiful (and improvised) line in the film is a good place to end. Sophie, on her eleventh birthday, is trying to record Calum with their DV camera in their bedroom. He asks him to turn it off when she begins to ask him searchingly about his own experience of turning eleven. Shutting the camcorder off, Sophie sits with her father and mimes recording him — and says,
This is my mind-camera.