Recently, I had a friend send me a video of my father dancing in the kitchen of our old house.
You can see me in the background, laughing along with him because that’s what I knew to do. It was something silly—elaborate footwork and flailing limbs, punctuated with a grin that stretched so far across his face it felt like he was trying to smile for the whole world. He often did that; smiled until it hurt, until we were smiling right back. He was always performing.
This kind of memory is balmy around the edges, faded like a years old polaroid that’s been catching the afternoon sun every day for the past however many days. I often find myself flipping through memories, in the same way one looks through a photo album, trying to find moments like this. You know, the kind that aren’t quite happy enough, or sad enough, or that capture all the anger from the 10th grade shot in b-roll type footage. No, these moments are plain—blink and you’ll forget they ever happened.
Starring Normal People breakout star Paul Mescal as Calum, a young father, and newcomer Frankie Corio as his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie, Aftersun is a semi-autobiographical film from first-time writer-director Charlotte Wells. It finds its central characters vacationing in Turkey at a resort that offers poolside loungers and polo-wearing staff performing the macarena. Structured in a way that’s familiar, it invites the viewers to feel like they’re watching their own home videos. The normality, the plainness of it all, becomes an itch that you can’t scratch. A lingering feeling without origin.
This is in part due to Sophie’s point of view. She’s nearing tween years, where adolescence becomes a hodgepodge of hanging on and letting go, like a battle between childhood and maturity. She’s ever-cautious, always scanning her surroundings and learning as much as she can in such little time. However, for the majority of the film, both Sophie and her father are caught up in the ebb and flow of their vacation, and only when the clement haze lifts do we start to see the strain beneath the surface.
Wells is not the type to give everything away, and rarely do we experience any dramatized situations beyond that infrequent, flickering club escapade (that we’re never truly sure is existent beyond older-Sophie’s visions). Through snapshots and old camcorder home videos, the audience sees only what older Sophie is able to remember. She’s looking back, looking through the eyes of her younger self and asking “what’s wrong with this picture?”. In turn, we’re asking that question as well.
Her narrative is not plot-driven, but is instead controlled by her emotions. As a result, the story doesn’t stick to the rules of a plot pyramid, nor does it carry any grand realization for Sophie. Rather, it’s a meditation on grief, and is illustrated in a way that is meant to blur memory and make-believe, to the point where the audience is left wondering how much belongs to Sophie and how much is invented to fill in the blanks.
Mescal delivers a heart-wrenching performance, and Corio brings a light to the character that elevates both the scene and her scene partner. Charlotte Wells and her actors have created something so poetic that transcends conventional plot structure and leaves behind a feeling of shared loneliness in its wake. That’s to say, Aftersun may not be for everyone, but its burn is quiet and it will stay with you for a long time afterward if you let it.
When I go back and watch that video of my father dancing, I try my best to think of the things that used to make us laugh, or cry, or yell—anything other than the still silence that stretches between us. I think for a long long time, and I wonder if we can ever be that way again.