A Masterful Ode to Fatherhood Told in the Language of Memory

One would be forgiven for expecting Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun to be another sentimental and cutesy parental figure-child drama about the unshakable bond between parenthood and wholesome childhood memories that has permeated indie cinema in recent years (ex: C’mon C’mon, Petite Maman). Don’t get me wrong, I love those kinds of films, but Wells makes them all look like child’s play with Aftersun, one of the most buzzed about films of the year. And trust me, it deserves every ounce of its acclaim and then some. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Aftersun is not only the greatest cinematic achievement of the 2020s thus far, but also one of the best films of all time. Wells, in this stunning debut, avoids sentimentality and saccharine, and instead blesses us with one of the most artfully restrained and subtle meditations on fatherhood, mental illness, and grief I’ve ever seen.

This film is highly autobiographical and without a doubt an ode to Wells’s own father, who she clearly loved dearly. The plot is unassuming enough. Aftersun is merely about a young girl, Sophie (Frankie Corio), on vacation in Turkey with her young father, Calum (Paul Mescal), who has recently separated from her mom. Their relationship is close, if ordinary, with an effortless naturalism. Calum is quickly established as the outwardly easygoing, fun parent (who is highly tolerant of young Sophie’s burgeoning agency) in a series of purposely disjointed childhood memories played back to us with ambiguous chronology. These scenes are interlaid with re-enacted home video clips that further enrich these disparate memories. However, as the film progresses, this nostalgic period of jovial holiday fun and authentic connection between father and daughter is revealed to be built on the shaky soil of Calum’s own psyche, which is one light storm away from a total collapse. Aftersun is a loving and empathetic celebration of Wells’s own father, but it’s also an interrogation. This film is an analysis of him through the few memories and haphazard video evidence she has left as she’s forced to reckon her adult perspective with the unassuming memories of a child. Wells remembers, recounts, and constructs a reality of her father for her own catharsis that is astonishingly beautiful in its ambiguity. Calum’s true feelings are never explicitly stated. However, thanks to Wells’s subtle writing and nuanced directing mixed with homey archival footage and interjections of surreal, metaphysical sequences, she is able paint a complete picture of who her father was, or at least as close to one as she can ever get. The film can break your heart and impact you irreparably without a single word uttered. It’s all in the implications, the expressions, the subtext, and the subtle tragedy of Calum’s disastrous selfishness and selflessness.

Frankie Corio is astounding in her debut role, giving one of the best child performances I’ve ever seen, and Paul Mescal, who I’ve had my eyes firmly fixed on since Normal People (a show I highly recommend), is a revelation. He gives what is far and away my favorite lead actor performance of the year. He conveys this complex blend of impulsive self-destruction, unconditional love for his daughter, and genuine, pervasive pain with a stunning power and sincerity, all without uttering a single word of it. It’s a quietly physical performance, as you feel far more from his unassuming glances and passing comments than you ever could from someone else’s explosive monologues or showy breakdowns. Calum is a father, a young man, and a lost soul in distress. He is constantly teetering on the edge of total annihilation, but desperately trying, against all odds, to be there for his daughter when he can’t be there for himself. He’s deeply flawed and far from a perfect father, but he wants nothing but the world for her.

That is the unspoken tragedy of Aftersun, an indignant tale of internal struggle and wanting to feel better and be better for a few measly days, or hell, for just one moment, that comes crashing down on us with its heart-stopping, unforgettable final shot. Frankly, I’m choking up just writing this. The power this film has while saying almost nothing outwardly is an incredible feat and is obviously largely thanks to Wells, Corio, Mescal, and company. However, one must not forget the immense strength of this film’s cinematography and editing. Both give the film a nostalgic, almost dream-like quality: like a blend of distant childhood memories and imagined, somewhat inaccurate scenarios that we use to fill in the gaps. The cinematography is light, hazy, and sun-kissed with some of the most subtly genius blocking I’ve seen. The editing is ambiguous and enchanting in its subtle scrambling of events and avoidance of obvious divulgences of emotion. Try as she might, Wells can never know the full extent of her father’s suffering, so we the viewer can’t either. Key context is left out and we are served multi-layered look after multi-layered look. But it all comes together in the most emotional film of the year and one of the most stunningly mature and restrained meditations on one’s own childhood and relationship with their parent in recent (or possibly all-time) memory. While barely conveying a single word spoken or single emotion clearly, Aftersun gives us the entire world and then rips it out, akin a once all-encompassing childhood experience now nothing more than a vague and elusive memory tainted by time. There’s a shot in the film that lingers on a slowly developing Polaroid of Sophie and her father. And that’s what this film feels like: a slowly realized portrait of a man Wells could only hope to truly know: a portrait that we slowly come to comprehend as the man himself slips away from us. A lesson learned too late. A reckoning that can now only hope to serve our own journey.

10/10