Starring: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall
Distributor: Kismet Unit Trust
Runtime: 101 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This British-American film follows the life and experiences of an 11-year-old Scottish girl who resurrects memories of going on vacation in Turkey with her father on the eve of his 31st birthday.
This dramatic film was named as one of the best movies of 2022 by the National Board of Review, and Mescal has been nominated in the 2023 Oscars for Best Lead Actor in a dramatic film.
A young Sophie (Corio) goes on a holiday to a budget resort in Turkey in the late 1990s with her loving, but troubled father, Calum Paterson (Mescal). Calum is separated from Sophie’s mother and has financial difficulties. On holiday, he exhibits signs of depression and detachment from his daughter, and her confusion seems to make him more depressed. Observant and intelligent, Sophie recognises that her father is coping with the strains of adulthood in ways she doesn’t quite understand. On her holiday, Sophie makes a number of attempts to close the distance between them, but struggles with how to do it. Calum and Sophie part at the airport, signalling the end of their holiday together in Turkey. Later, as an adult, with her own child, Sophie looks at the video footage of times spent with her father together in Turkey, when he was a parent she thought she understood. Memories are deceptive.
Affected by what happens to his daughter on holiday, Calum becomes emotionally uncertain about life ahead as he sinks deeper into depression. He is both a loving, caring parent, and a man sobbing uncontrollably alone in his hotel room. The film challenges viewers to revisit memories of their loved ones to form their own judgments of who they really are. In spontaneous fashion, the film explores the inner worlds of consciousness and human feeling, and it probes connections between past and present in highly original ways. Mescal delivers an amazingly subtle performance.
Wells, in her first feature film as director, takes viewers on a voyage that is significant for the insights it engenders, and it targets memory and feelings in provocative ways. Twenty years later, as a grown woman, Sophie struggles to reconcile the man she thought she knew with the man she thinks he really is. This is a subtle film about the ambiguity of human relationships that intimately connects feelings with memories of past events. It is a powerful coming-of-age movie that dissects the themes of love and loss in an entirely naturalistic and moving. It filters memories of real events, that may have been shaped by a child’s imagination.
The final scenes suggest that Sophie is an adult seeking clues that will reveal to her the truth about things she didn’t understand as a child. The result is a profoundly personal movie that is highly contemplative. The movie cleverly transports viewers into a world that may have been never experienced, but feels as if it was, so blurring truth, fiction, imagination and reality.
Aftersun is a film about what Sophie saw as a child, and an adult’s perspective can give a separate meaning. The film’s hand-held camerawork sustains tension, and the complete naturalism of the acting is carefully guided by Wells. The film is a highly inventive analysis of human frailty.
Behind the apparent ease of the acting between parent and child, Well’s sharp control expertly plays out, and she intriguingly challenges our perceptions of what has happened and who we are. Wells describes her debut as director as one that was ‘emotionally auto-biographical’.
This is a highly meditative, contemplative film that is nostalgic in a fluid, creative and spontaneous way. Its ambiguity and melancholy cry out for interpretation all the time. It is also an unsettling film that reflects thoughtfully and introspectively on human relationships, especially those involving parent and child.
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