Aftersun review
London Film Festival 2022
Snippets of fragmented grainy camcorder footage are woven throughout this daring directorial debut from Charlotte Wells, infusing scenes with a memory-soaked, pensive tone. Reaching for clarity in the lagging blurs and glitches of the grainy videos, we ourselves enact a kind of re-examination of past relationships which mimics that of protagonist Sophie, in this heartbreaking tale of love and loss.
Wells calls the project a work of “auto-biographical fiction” - it depicts the personal story of a poignant and bittersweet resort holiday in Turkey she took at 11 with her father. But the story is only tangentially bound to reality, with its characters fictionalised as Sophie and Calum, and played by Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal, whose rapport feels authentic and utterly spellbinding.
The film is doused in the sun-washed feeling of youthful summer package holidays, with chirping cicadas, plastic arcade games and karaoke nights.
Wells masters the coming of age genre and these sensory evocations of youth. There is a sparky, ‘lightning-in-a-bottle’ energy in Aftersun reminiscent of some of the greatest films based on childhood memories of their directors, like Tomboy or Summer 1993.
We are submerged in Sophie’s early teenage experience - the camera is held at her eye line as she looks up at the older teenagers drinking and flirting around the resort, and jolts in and out of splashing water when she is overwhelmed and alienated in a rowdy game of water polo. She is assertive and confident but there’s a confused and slightly daunted look behind her eyes as she grapples with the realities of the adult world.
Gregory Oke’s stunning cinematography is also central to the palpable atmosphere. Paragliders are framed in a wash of blue sky, reflected and distorted on ripples in the pool surface. At one point, the divisions between Sophie and her father are summed up in one simple shot, as they sit either side of a wall, Sophie absorbed in her book under the safe yellow glow of the hotel lamp; Calum soaked in melancholic blue darkness.
Her parents separated, time alone with Calum is rare for Sophie, and for the weeks in Turkey, within this parenthesis away from real life, their relationship morphs and emotions surface. Behind the embarrassing dad-dancing and cheeky games, there is a darkness in Calum which Sophie isn’t able to comprehend fully.
Calum habitually practises Tai Chi, swaying in silent solitude on the balcony as Sophie sleeps, but never seems to have a grasp of control. Little hints at his destructive habits are economically revealed; scrapes and bruises appear on his body after nights out alone; he arrives in Turkey with a broken arm which he cannot account for; he dips into unresponsiveness (remedied by alcohol), where he fails to engage with Sophie’s sparky childhood spontaneity.
One devastating scene sees Sophie round up other holidayers to sing happy birthday to him, but he is agonisingly unable to access or reciprocate this joy and stares back at the crowd frozen, his eyes panicked and fraught with pain.
Form is played with in a refreshing and brave nature, jumping from slow burn naturalism to flashbacks and avant garde montages. Glimpses of the older Sophie and imagined memories and encounters with her father segment the story. Now the same age as her father was, and having become a parent herself, she looks back to the holiday. All the while we watch and sometimes rewatch sections of the trip via camcorder videos, forcing us to attempt to grasp (along with the older Sophie) the internal battles faced by Calum.
The film gradually builds towards an exquisite transcendental climax in which Sophie reaches out and backwards to her father, seeing him with replenished understanding in her adulthood and reflecting on their love, yearning for a more transparent past connection with him. Up until this moment tension and empathy are built through quiet naturalism, so masterfully that you don’t even notice it’s happening, landing an unexpected emotional blow that leaves you stunned. The regretful retrospection we enact with Sophie, and her devastating inability to go back and change things, will stay with you for weeks.