Movies exist for a lot of reasons. To reflect our lives. To offer an escape. To trigger something deep within us we hardly recognize. But by their nature, these expressions are imperfect. Whether it’s unconvincing CGI or simply a bad line reading that takes you out of the moment, cinema is not reality. Our memories operate similarly, twisting facts to match our emotions—distorting the truth in a lifelong game of Telephone we play with ourselves. Aftersun, the splash-of-cold-water debut from Charlotte Wells, is where the falsehoods of movies and memories meet. The results are nothing short of masterful.
The film follows a woman, Sophie (Ceila Rowlson-Hall), as she rewatches old home movies from a vacation she took to Turkey with her father one summer in the ‘90s. Shaky camcorder recordings are interspersed with typical cinematic narrative and short bouts of surrealism as Sophie tries to paint a picture of the past. To what end we don’t totally get to find out, but that hardly lessens the impact.
Much of this reminiscence therapy is seen through the eyes of Sophie’s 11-year-old self (Francesca Corio), who serves as Aftersun’s true lead. As she often plays with their camcorder, there are truths of her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), that recontextualize her memories and overall perception of this man she so clearly deems to be loving and caring. And for the most part, it’s clear that he is—it’s just also clear that darker sides of his life have put a translucent ceiling on the amount of love and care this single father is capable of.
Wells’ direction brilliantly keeps us in the dark as small pieces of this vacation unravel. Sometimes the changing details are blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em, sometimes they’re more overt. A simmering darkness hangs over their extended summer holiday in paradise. 26-year-old Mescal is hardly ready to enter the dad phase of his acting career, but that’s part of the point here. Early on, the pair are mistaken as siblings. We’re witnessing children raising children, as Calum, who clearly plays second fiddle in parenting duties to Sophie’s unseen mother, is consistently on edge around his daughter, even if not always noticeably to her. Sweet and caring as he may be, there’s at once distance and an almost lazy trust he places in young Sophie. In a few troubling instances, it seems like he’d rather be on a different kind of vacation entirely.
Mescal proves here that the range he exhibited on Hulu’s 12-episode Normal People adaptation can be exhibited in a slick hour-and-40-minute feature. His charm is undeniable, but it’s the bridges he builds to this more troubled version of Calum that make this one of the best performances of the year.
Close behind is Corio, who delivers one of the great child performances of our time. Aftersun more or less belongs to her, and it’s a stunning first credit on what will hopefully be a long resume after the film’s release.
She and Mescal nail their characters’ very specific chemistry from their first scene together. Without it, Aftersun likely wouldn’t be able to meet its lofty ambitions and come out as strong as it has. But this is the rare film that gets just about everything right while pushing the envelope of the cinematic playground (it’s hard to be entirely surprised though when your distributor is A24 and one of your producers is Barry Jenkins). The truth at the center of Aftersun is a pill we as humans will usually do anything to avoid swallowing. There’s risk in mythologizing those closest to us, but perhaps there’s inevitable pain in the truth. By our nature, we are imperfect. But a film as empathetic to the core as Aftersun beautifully understands that our faults and misgivings do not translate to the absence of love.
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