Aftersun

Aftersun is an overwhelmingly evocative film that will induce a deep nostalgia in the viewer at the hands of debut film director Charlotte Wells. It is difficult to pinpoint the wizardry Wells uses to inflict such emotion, but huge credit must go to the beautifully understated performances of Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio.

Mescal plays Calum, a young recently separated father to eleven year-old Sophie, played by Corio. The film shows the adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) looking back at a holiday the pair shared in the 1990s to Turkey through DV-cam footage and photo albums. The blurring of past and present unveils opaque spaces of memory where retrospective questions can be posed of the characters, exposing revelations which could not have been unearthed at the time. The elusiveness of understanding something in the present which is beyond the characters in the past is piercing, and carries with it a vague threat of pain and absence. Sophie asks her father in one scene “I’m eleven years-old now…what did you think you would be when you grew up when you were eleven?”. Calum does not answer, but the devastating truth that he probably would not have chosen to be a young father is there on his face in an acting masterclass from Mescal. Despite a looming unspoken regret, there is a great deal of tenderness between Sophie and her father, a credible relationship of such warmth that the audience is never in doubt as to its authenticity.

This is a film that will stay with you, will force a re-examination of the assumptions made in your own life, and will move you in simultaneously unexplainable, and utterly undeniable power.